Deaf People Reacting to Subtitles

Submission 23,954

About

Deaf People Reacting to Subtitles refer to a series of images which parody and hyperbolize reactions which deaf people experience when reading film subtitles and captions.

Origin

On April 14th, 2018, Redditor^[1] vicious_viridian posted an image of a man performing a dance move, presented as a reaction which deaf people have when "[music]" caption appears on screen, to /r/dankmeme subreddit. The post gained over 9,500 upvotes in six months.

Spread

In the following months, the image was multiple times reposted on Reddit and other online platforms. For examples, a repost in /r/dankmemes subreddit made on May 24th, 2018,^[2] gained over 11,100 upvotes. Another repost in /r/me_irl subreddit,^[3] made on October 26th, 2018, received over 27,200 upvotes.

On March 10th, 2019, Redditor _rick_sanchez_c_137_ posted a similarly captioned meme with another reaction mage to /r/dankmemes subreddit,^[4] where it gained over 11,000 upvotes in 12 days (shown below, left). On March 17th, 2019, Redditor TibbeOrdelman another version of the meme to the subreddit,^[5] which accumulated over 34,500 upvotes in five days (shown below, right).

In the following days, posts imagining humorous reactions deaf people experience when seeing captions and subtitles were posted in /r/dankmemes,^[6] /r/memes^[7] and other subreddits.

On March 21th, YouTuber PewDiePie reviewed several examples of the meme in an episode of Meme Review. ^[8]