I Lied

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About

"I Lied" is a nefarious-looking blue and black drawing of a face that is often used as the punchline of rage comics and is meant to indicate that the subject in the comic has been dishonest in some way, often in a very insignificant "white lie."

Origin

According to a timeline of rageface origins on Reddit^[1], the first instance of 'I Lied' was in a comic posted by Redditor Coveiro titled "I was way evil back then"^[3] on May 10th, 2011. The thread reached the front page of the f7u12 subreddit and accumulated 8,753 up votes prior to being archived. A revised version of the face that became common in other rage comics began with the second ‘I Lied’^[4] thread made by Coveiro on May 14th, 2011.

Precursor

The rage face functions in a similar fashion to the slang word "psych" (also known as "sike", or "syke"), that indicates that a lie has just been told. From Urban Dictionary^[4]:

The word often used as an exclamation which serves to tell what you just said was false or wrong.
used to retract a lie
used to fake, fool, or decieve someone in a funny joking sarcastic way
means "just kidding" or "not!"
may also be spelled sike or psyche

On TV Tropes^[9], "I Lied" is described as a common phrase associated with villains in fictional works.

Stock Phrase uttered in response to You Said You Would Let Them Go or a similar expression of shock at a broken promise of lenience or forgiveness. Spoken by the villain (or a particularly unmerciful hero) just before killing the hostage, blowing up the Doomed Hometown, using the Doomsday Device, or some other act of merciless badness. Sometimes spoken just after, with a smirk and a smoking gun.

Spread

A compilation of "I Lied" comics were posted to the blog Pleated Jeans^[13] on June 30th, 2011. On August 23rd, a slideshow featuring various "I Lied" comics was uploaded to YouTube. On July 31st, artist Sam Spartt uploaded an artistic rendition of the "I Lied" face to his Flickr page.

The "I Lied Meme" single topic Tumblr was created on October 3rd. A Meme Generator^[15] page has 152 submissions, a Quickmeme^[16] page has 211 submissions and a Facebook fan page has 4,272 likes as of December 7th, 2011. Additional derivatives can be found on Memebase^[10], Tumblr^[11] and FunnyJunk.^[12]

Notable Examples

Derivative: Strawberry Guy

On June 22nd, 2011, a comic was posted to Memebase titled "Just wait until you see Strawberry Guy"^[6] that pointed out that I Lied guy resembled a blueberry looking. The following day, Cheezburger user Yarcofin submitted a re-framed comic with Strawberry Guy in the final panel accompanied by the text "challenge accepted".

On August 13th, a new version of Strawberry Guy was submitted by user RMPage in a comic titled "Strawberry's Official Return."^[7] This was added to the Rage Builder^[8] along with other I Lied variations like "No Homo", "Watermelon Man" and "Bad Apple" under the category "Fruit Men" on August 19th, 2011.