Exposed Nerve

About

Exposed Nerve refers to a comic showing one creepy character "pulling a silly prank" on their friend which is just pulling on an exposed nerve in their arm. The comic became an exploitable and was also made into multiple viral videos on YouTube. The original image was shared on Twitter in early 2022. The trend is similar to the You're Pointless trend.

Origin

On March 26th, 2022, Twitter^[2] user db_witch, also known as WitchDoctorDB 🏴‍☠️, posted a comic showing one creepy, rectangular character pulling the exposed nerve ending of its friend standing next to it. The comic was captioned, "pull this silly prank on your friends!!!" and over the course of three months, the tweet received roughly 203,300 likes (shown below).

Spread

On March 26th, 2022, the comic was reposted to Reddit's Thanks, I Hate It, ^[3] where over the course of three months, it received roughly 23,800 upvotes.

On April 10th, 2022, the YouTube channel FTD Co., Ltd. posted a video that dubbed over the comic, earning roughly 22,200 views in two months (shown below). The video was originally shared within the YouTube channel's Discord server sometime in early April 2022.

The aforementioned dub was reposted multiple times on YouTube going into the remainder of April 2022 and into May. Additionally, other creators started making their own videos using the comic. For instance, on April 18th, 2022, YouTuber Vanity #SAVETF2 posted a video that received roughly 17,800 views over the curse of a month and a half (shown below, left).

By June 2022, the videos became increasingly uncanny as different animators inserted their own styles. For instance, on June 1st, 2022, YouTuber Hydraulic Beanbag posted an interaction that received roughly 1.3 million views in five days (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References