Creepy Asterisks

Submission 30,693

About

Creepy Asterisks is the colloquial term for cringeworthy text messages wherein a person roleplays their actions by saying what they're doing between asterisk marks. The trope began growing popular online after the creation of a subreddit devoted to such text messages.

Origin

The practice likely started in Multi-user Dungeons / Domains and has been called "bounding asterisks."^[5] On November 20th, 2016, the /r/creepyasterisks^[1] subreddit was launched, which serves as a community for sharing screenshots of flirtatious and overtly sexual text messages with actions written between asterisks.

Precursor

Before a community emerged to explicitly mock such text messages, the practice of mocking people using asterisks to describe their actions had seen some use in memes. Most notably, the practice was mocked in memes like *Tips Fedora* and Notices Bulge / OwO What's This?

Spread

As of January 22nd, 2019, the most popular post on the subreddit is a post by Th3GreenMan56^[2] that gained over 65,000 points (shown below).

Other popular posts on the subreddit include a post by bcoltharp that gained over 43,000 points (shown below, left) and a post by hurtsp that gained over 30,000 points (shown below, right).

The practice was also mocked in articles on College Humor^[3] and Mel.^[4] In Mel's article, author Quinn Myers interviewed Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguistics professor at Bowling Green State University. Wells-Jensen wrote, "It’s a lot of work to write, ‘I feel overwhelmed, and I’m not socially adept so I hope you’ll think kindly of my conversational attempt here,’ but if you could just say *blushes; shuffles feet*, that has an even chance of getting your point across with much less effort.” Other commenters stated the messages typically come from younger male anime fans, some of whom have confessed to being on the autism spectrum. The practice was defined as "Asteracting" on Urban Dictionary (shown below).

On January 19th, 2019, the subreddit/ /r/creepyasterisks was reviewed by PewDiePie, helping it gain widespread attention (shown below).