Eternal Rat Prism

Submission 3,906

About

Eternal Rat Prism refers to a viral X / Twitter post in which user @venuslovesrats shared a printout of a pyramid with a photo of a rat spread across each of its faces, allowing users to print it for themselves and fold it into an "eternal rat prism." The post was made in late April 2024 and inspired users to post their eternal rat prism printouts and create their own "eternal prisms" with alternative images. Although it is referred to as an "eternal rat prism," the cutout actually forms a pyramid, which is not technically a prism. The printout may be inspired by the Obamium meme, based around a rendering of a pyramid with Barack Obama's face on it that also inspired people to print it out and make it into a physical pyramid.

Origin

On April 27th, 2024, X^[1] user @venuslovesrats posted a printout of an "eternal rat prism" consisting of several attached triangles with every face containing a portion of a rat photograph, advertising it as "a fun activity for school children." When printed, folded and glued or taped together, the printout forms a pyramid that resembles a rat. The sheet reads, "Print and glue together the rat prism and have a friend for eternity! It's OK because the rat likes it." The post gained over 45,000 likes and 7,000 reposts in four days (shown below).

Spread

The rat prism post inspired people to print out the sheet, fold their own eternal rat prisms and post photos of them online. It also inspired some people to create their own variations of eternal prisms.

On April 27th, 2024, the prism was reposted to /r/TheRatEmpire,^[2] garnering over 420 upvotes in four days. That same day, X^[3] user @ArthropodJay posted a photo of their rat prism printout, garnering over 200 likes in the same span of time (shown below, left). On April 28th, X^[4] user @galaxylover06 posted an alternative eternal prism featuring an image of the Sonic the Hedgehog character Silver, garnering over 16,000 likes in three days (shown below, right).

That day, X^[5] user @Aidan_Wolf posted a video of a Snapchat^[6] lens based on the eternal rat prism, garnering over 500 likes in three days.

Various Examples

Obamium

Obamium, also known as Obama Pyramid and Obama Prism, refers to a series of memes imagining various chemical substances and geometric figures consisting of and named after the former United States President Barack Obama. Spawned by a GIF circulated in ironic communities in August 2019, the meme saw viral spread in the following months.

Similarly to the eternal rat prism, the Obamium meme inspired some social media users to create printouts of the meme and fold them into physical pyramids (example shown below).