Don't Talk To Me Or My Son Ever Again

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Part of a series on Cowboy Bebop. [View Related Entries]

About

"Don't Talk To Me Or My Son Ever Again" is a catchphrase associated with images featuring an iconic fictional character and its miniature offspring, the latter of which is produced by modifying the former character in image-editing applications like Photoshop. Originally introduced through a fan-made parody image of the Cowboy Bebop character Spike Spiegel in November 2014, the meme has seen a significant resurgence on Tumblr and Twitter following an influx of derivative "father-and-son" character images in late 2015.

Origin

On November 4th, 2014, Tumblr user Splendidland^[1] posted a picture featuring the character Spike Spiegel from the anime series Cowboy Bebop with a miniature version of himself, featuring the catchphrase "don't ever talk to me or my son ever again." The post gained over 6,300 notes in the following year. The origin of the quote Don't talk to me or my son ever again is unknown, but it is presumed to have been added by the original Tumblr user for comedic effect.

Spread

For the most part of 2015, the fad remained dormant until August 24th, when Tumblr user konkeydongcountry^[6] posted a picture showing a wool plush toy and a smaller amiibo figure of Yoshi that were released to promote Nintendo's side-scrolling platformer video game Yoshi's Woolly World for Wii U, captioned with the catchphrase (shown below, left). In the next six months, Tumblr user Konkeydongcountry's post gained over 3,900 notes. On October 30th, Twitter user @theyoshibot^[5] tweeted a photograph of a life-size Yoshi costume and a digitally-edited miniature version of the costume, along with the catchphrase (shown below, right), which gained over 3,000 likes and retweets in less than five months.

Throughout the remainder of 2015, additional variations of the photoshop fad continued to gain momentum on popular media-sharing sites, mainly on Tumblr^[2] and Twitter.^[7] On January 4th, 2016, the Tumblr meme documentation blog Meme Archives^[4] ran a post identifying the original instance of the meme.^[4] On February 11th, Redditor PlaceboWizard posted a question about the meme's backstory to the /r/OutOfTheLoop^[3] subreddit, where it gained over 60 points (87% upvoted) and seven comments.