Heisenbones

About

Heisenbones or Walter White's Skeletal Companion is a skeleton character used in ironic Breaking Bad memes that claim he was a sidekick to Walter and Jesse in the TV series Breaking Bad. The made-up character was first posted to Reddit in July 2022 in a meme claiming he doesn't exist and is an example of the Mandela Effect. Memes ironically insisting the character does exist became popularized on subreddits like /r/okbuddychicanery in the following months, including photoshopped images of Heisenbones in various scenes of the show, often making skeleton-based puns. The meme is similar to other fake characters like Gumbly.

Origin

On July 3rd, 2022, Redditor Arian_bk posted a meme to /r/196^[1] showing Walter and Jesse cooking meth with a 3D skeleton standing between them, captioned, "NEW MANDELLA EFFECT: WALTER WHITES BELOVED SKELETAL COMPANION DOES NOT EXIST IN THIS UNIVERSE," garnering over 5,000 upvotes in two months (shown below). It was reposted to /r/lies^[2] on July 6th, captioned, "apparently Heisenbones is not real," garnering over 4,200 upvotes in the same span of time.

Spread

On July 29th, 2022, an /r/okbuddychicanery^[3] user posted a video meme captioned, "Remember when Skyler exposed Walt, and Heisenbones said “Walter, Looks like we’re boned…” 😝😂 classic Heisenbones 🤣😂," insisting that Heisenbones existed, garnering over 3,400 upvotes in two months (shown below). On July 30th, a user on /r/betterCallSaul^[4] claimed Heisenbones makes 34 appearances in Better Call Saul in a list of character appearances, garnering over 600 upvotes in two months.

The meme continued to spread over the following months, mostly on Breaking Bad themed meme subreddits including /r/okbuddychicanery and /r/whenthe. On September 15th, a Redditor posted a new meme about Heisenbones to /r/okbuddychicanery,^[5] garnering over 1,500 upvotes in four days (shown below, left). On September 17th, a Redditor posted an Ask Me Anything post claiming to be Heisenbones to /r/okbuddychicanery,^[6] garnering over 3,400 upvotes in two days. On the same day, a Twitter^[7] user posted a meme claiming Heisenbones appears in "season 2 episode 11 23:08 to 23:43" of Breaking Bad, which is the timestamp of Skyler's Happy Birthday Scene. On September 19th, a Redditor posted a meme to /r/okbuddychicanery^[8] showing a fake Wikipedia page for the character, garnering over 1,600 upvotes in under 10 hours (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References