I'm Going to Tell You a Great Story

Confirmed 55,437

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About

I'm Going to Tell You a Great Story refers to an exploitable 3-panel comic in which the poster imagines themselves as a grandfather who is approached by their grandson asking about something of the grandfather's he found, usually a video game or an anime. The grandfather in the image then tells his son to sit down and tears up as he says a variant of "I'm gonna tell you a great story."

Origin

The earliest known post of the format was posted by Papakurtz on June 26th, 2014, on Be-troll.com (shown below).

On August 28th, 2015, a variation of the image was uploaded to Reddit in /r/lewronggeneration^[1] and featured the boy holding a copy of Super Smash Brothers Melee (shown below). The post bears a Melee Hell watermark, suggesting it came from the popular Facebook community. This was likely the start of the meme's wider spread.

Spread

Over the coming years, variations would appear with different video games and subcultures such as Grand Theft Auto and Assassin's Creed. On September 7th, 2015, Southernboyj uploaded a version with Runescape to /r/runescape^[3] that gained 1,150 points (shown below, left). On June 30th, 2016, Sizzle^[2] scraped a post referencing Grand Theft Auto from Instagram that had gained over 1,600 likes, though the post has since been deleted (shown below, right).

On June 23rd, 2017, the format was posted to /r/MemeEconomy with Naruto and gained 27 points,^[4] suggesting the template may be on the rise (shown below).