Let Me Love You

Submission 28,696

About

"Let Me Love You" is an expression often paired with out-of-context images and animated GIFs in which a subject is shown chasing after another.

Origin

The phrase "Let Me Love You" has been used as the title of several pop songs. The first of these to become popular on an international level was an R&B song released by the American artist Mario in 2004, charting in first place in the US, New Zealand, and several countries in Europe.^[1]

However, the phrase didn't get widely incorporated into reaction images and GIFs until circa 2012, when it began to pick up steam in the pop culture fandom blogosphere on Tumblr, including Supernatural, The Hunger Games and The Avengers, among many others.

Spread

One of the first widespread variants of the meme is based on a still frame of Spongebob Squarepants pointing with a look of anger and aggression on his face, derived from a scene from the December 2000 episode Dying for Pie.^[2] The image is also frequently associated with the phrase "come back here and love me".

On February 3rd, 2013, an animated GIF of an ostrich chasing a baby giraffe, as originally seen in a YouTube video uploaded in 2009, featuring the caption "LET ME LOVE YOU" was uploaded to Imgur^[4], which subsequently began circulating on Reddit^[5], Tumblr^[7], Giphy^[6] and elsewhere online.^[3]^[8]