Immediately Killed By Shadow People

About

Immediately Killed By Shadow People refers to the bottom text of a Bad Luck Brian meme featuring top text reading "tries astral projection." The catchphrase became popular in ironic image macros and shitposts starting in 2019, with a cutout of the bottom text becoming an exploitable over the course of the next two years.

Origin

The earliest available upload of the Bad Luck Brian meme reading "immediately killed by shadow people" was uploaded to Tumblr^[1] on March 25th, 2016 by skyroller, reposted from now-inactive page memeufacturing.

Spread

On May 26th, 2019, Tumblr^[2] user iamoutofideas posted a new image macro featuring an image of Ray William Johnson with top text reading, "Searches 'grandfather clock' on Google" and the bottom text, "immediately killed by shadow people," meant as a nonsense shitpost (shown below). The post gained over 8,100 notes in two years.

On June 30th, Instagram^[4] user new.incognito.tab posted a Mac and Charlie Crying meme using a cutout of the bottom text from the Bad Luck Brian meme for the text, garnering over 3,700 likes in two years (shown below).

On December 18th, iFunny^[3] user AdrianRamos used the bottom text from the Bad Luck Brian meme in a new shitpost, garnering over 700 smiles in roughly two years (shown below).

Over the course of 2020, a number of new variations of the meme were posted online, typically to iFunny, Instagram, and Tumblr. On April 21st of that year, Facebook^[8][9] page Chad Mojito's Shmegeggy Sobornost & Senseless Drivel Cult Supercluster posted a collection of various memes using the exploitable, many over other Bad Luck Brian memes (examples shown below, left and right).

In mid-2021, these variants started gaining more popularity on Instagram, often reposted by larger meme pages. For example, on May 25th, 2021, Instagram^[6] meme page @inhalemywasps posted a version of the meme originally posted to iFunny^[7] in April 2020, garnering over 13,700 likes in a month (shown below). On June 24th, Instagram^[5] user @salad.snake reposted the Mac and Charlie Crying meme, garnering over 31,000 likes in a day.

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References