About

Let's Kill Him is a reaction image of SpongeBob SquarePants character Mr. Krabs suggesting to Squidward that they should kill SpongeBob. A recaption of How Do We Tell Him?, the reaction and image macro meme format achieved virality on social media as a way to express disagreement and vexation in late 2022, spawning further variations in early 2023.

Origin

Let's Kill Him is a recaptioned version of How Do We Tell Him, which originated from episode 24A "Dying for Pie" of SpongeBob SquarePants (shown below, left).^[1] The earliest found post of the recaptioned image was made by Twitter^[2] user @_TweetCritic on August 7th, 2022, although it's likely that the image originated earlier (shown below, right).

Spread

The reaction image saw moderate spread across Twitter through the second half of 2022. For example, on September 29th, 2022, Twitter^[3] user @AlimationsX used the image to reply to a post about dragon designs, which gained 430 likes in four months (shown below, left). On October 20th, Tumblr^[4] user awetistic-things posted an image caption meme that received over 1,200 likes and reblogs in three months (shown below, right).

On January 10th, 2023, Twitter^[5] user @VyletPony posted four versions of the reaction with different pronouns, with the post gaining over 8,600 retweets and 58,600 likes in 10 days (shown below).

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

External References