Gender Reveal Wildfire / It's A Boy!

Submission 49,276

Part of a series on Gender Reveals. [View Related Entries]

Overview

Gender Reveal Wildfire refers to a California wildfire started by a pyrotechnic device at a gender reveal party which burned over 8,600 acres. After news of the fire's source spread online, people made jokes by showing various disastrous or deadly scenarios reimagined as if they were gender reveals, often featuring the caption It's A Boy!

Background

On September 5th, 2020, the use of a smoke-generating device at a gender reveal party sparked the El Dorado Fire in San Bernardino County.^[1] According to local authorities, the party's organizers and the person who ignited the pyrotechnic device could be charged with misdemeanors or felonies, pending investigation. The fire's origin was reported by the Cal Fire BDU on September 6th.^[2]^[3]

Developments

As news of the fire's trivial origin spread on Twitter, people joked about it by imagining other careless and destructive activities that could be turned into gender reveal parties. For example, user @sarahschauer^[4] joked about her gender reveal involving the beating of an endangered rhinoceros, gaining over 180 retweets and 4,900 likes (shown below, left). User @MuscleSkoals^[5] tweeted a Trolley Problem parody in which each track runs over a set of boys or girls, gaining over 9,100 retweets and 58,000 likes (shown below, right).

Many of the parodies regarding the fire showed various disastrous situations to represent terrible gender reveals. Most of these were captioned "It's a boy!" For example, user @CSpencerYeh^[6] tweeted a picture of a massive explosion on earth captioned "It's a boy!", gaining over 7,900 retweets and 55,000 likes (shown below, left). User @EricAllenHatch^[7] posted a picture from the film Terminator 2: Judgement Day of the character Sarah Connor's skeleton being incinerated by a nuclear blast captioned "It's a boy!", gaining over 12,000 retweets and 83,000 likes (shown below, right).

On September 7th, YouTuber Cr1tikal released a video commenting on the situation that received over 1.7 million views in less than a day (shown below).^[8]