Eat The Child

Submission 28,429

Part of a series on Tumblr. [View Related Entries]

About

Eat The Child is a Tumblr phrasal meme made in parody of advertisements for role-playing mobile games which require players to make difficult decisions.

Origin

Tumblr user @euargh^[3] started the meme by commenting "eat the child" on an advertisement from thewalkingdeadroadtosurvival^[2] promoting their mobile game based on The Walking Dead. The advertisement presents a scenario where you have one meal to share between yourself and a small child. While the comment itself is not dated, the earliest reference made by euargh to starting the meme appears on September 3rd, 2017.

Spread

This led to dozens of users spam commenting the advertisement with "Eat the Child." Several of these are used in reference to the Walking Dead advertisement. For example, on September 15th, 2017, Tumblr user ryanphantom^[1] reblogged the sponsored advertisement with the phrase "EAT THE CHILD" (shown below).

This practice soon spread to other sponsored posts on Tumblr. On October 14th, 2017, Tumblr user talkativetiad^[4] posted their discovery that multiple mobile ads were flooded with comments saying "Eat the Child" or variants thereof (examples shown below).

On October 16th, user stabbysideblog^[5] replied to an advertisement for Panera Bread with the phrase, bringing the meme outside of mobile game ads. Meme Documentation^[6] documented the meme on October 16th as well.