Shit, I'm Late For School / Toast of Tardiness

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Part of a series on Tumblr. [View Related Entries]

About

"Shit, I'm Late for School" is a photo fad in which participants typically make an exaggerated running motion while carrying various objects in their mouth, accompanied by the phrasal template "Shit, I'm late for X school!" The pose is inspired by an anime trope in which students are shown rushing to school while carrying a piece of toast in their mouth.

Origin

On August 6th, 2012, Tumblr user badcgijosh posted^[1] a picture of himself posing as if he was running with a piece of toast in his mouth followed by the caption, "Shit, I'm late for anime school." As of August 28th, the post has 44,961 notes.

Precursor

As early as August 1st, 2010, members of Anime forum Mabinogi World^[2] were discussing the origin of characters depicted as rushing for school while eating toast, noting its popular use in Shoujo^[3] manga written for a female audience. In October 2011, a single topic Tumblr named “Fuck Yeah Animu Toast”^[5] was created to celebrate images of anime characters running with toast. As of August 2012, TV Tropes^[4] lists nearly 50 instances of "running late for school" characters in Anime/Manga and points out that it is so overused, many manga-drawing guides advise against using it.

Spread

The day after the first image was posted by Tumblr user Badcgijosh, Fuck Yeah Anime Toast reblogged the photo^[9] but parodies of this image did not begin appearing until August 27th with one of the first derivatives showing Tumblr user minsterofsass^[10] being late for Canadian school while holding a bottle of maple syrup with his teeth (shown below). That evening, dozens of derivatives began appearing on Tumblr with the tags “late for school”^[11], “shit I’m late for school”^[12], “shit I’m late”^[13] and “late.”^[14] The following day, the Daily Dot^[15] published a collection of eight instances of the photo fad.

On August 27th, Tumblr user Badcgijosh expressed negative feelings^[7] about the photo fad, stating that he does not “like encouraging people to be lazy about their humour … there are things that are exponentially funnier to be said by anyone without using a template I literally spent ten seconds planning.”^[8] That same day, Tumblr artist payface^[6] posted a comic (shown below) to express badcgijosh’s displeasure over people overusing the joke.