HOW

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Part of a series on Illegal Minecraft Building Techniques. [View Related Entries]

About

HOW refers to a textual reaction commonly used to express a high degree of incredulity. Originally used as a part of Illegal Minecraft Building Techniques memes in early 2019, in August 2019 the meme received negative undertones on Twitter after being used as a response to Minecraft Bee Is Trans arguments and trans-related posts in general.

Origin

On February 27th, 2019, Instagram user benisblaster posted an image of a bald rat captioned "HOW" (post shown below, top left).^[1] The post gained over 2,400 likes in seven months. In the following days, benisblaster made a series of posts based on the Illegal Minecraft Building Techniques meme captioned "HOW,"^[2]^[3]^[4] with multiple notable Instagram, iFunny and Twitter accounts sharing the meme in the following days (shown below).

Spread

In the following months, "HOW" reply has been used by users on Instagram, iFunny, Twitter and other online platforms as a textual reaction to various things deemed impossible or confusing, primarily in Minecraft and other video games.

On August 23rd, 2019, following the release of 19w34a test version of Minecraft featuring bees, Twitter user @Ezramouse tweeted "The Minecraft bee is trans," spawning a meme of the same name (tweet no longer available). On the same day, Twitter user @WormsCrazyGolf tweeted "how" in a response,^[5] with the post gaining over 50 retweets and 260 likes, and with @Ezramouse proceeding to block the user. On August 24th, @WormsCrazyGolf posted a screenshot of the exchange and the block message, with the tweet receiving over 16,700 retweets and 80,600 likes.^[6]

On the same day, Twitter user @BBorchgard tweeted an NPC Wojak comic based on the exchange, gaining over 420 retweets and 4,600 likes (shown below, left).^[7] In the following days, the reply has been used as a response to "Minecraft Bee Is Trans" tweets and other trans-related posts on Twitter, with the picture of the Red Engineer from @WormsCrazyGolf's profile also seeing similar use.

On August 31st, 2019, Twitter user @greenchile03 tweeted "The "how" reply on Twitter is trans" with the word "how" written on the transgender flag.^[8] The tweet received over 4,600 retweets and 19,500 likes in one week (shown below).