Skeptical Snake

Submission 15,982

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

About

Skeptical Snake, also known as Squinting Snake and Suspicious Snake, refers to two images of a long-nosed whip snake which are posted together or separately. One of the images features the face of the green snake seemingly squinting suspiciously or judgmentally while the other photograph features the skinny long body of the snake. Both images are posted to convey a sense of suspicion and first gained notable popularity in 2016, gaining further spread in late September 2019.

Origin

On October 19th, 2019, wildlife researcher and photographer Jonathan Hakim featured several photographs of long-nosed whip snakes, native to Thailand, in Reptiles and Amphibians of Bangkok blog (shown below).^[5]

Spread

On December 13th, 2013, Owned^[1] user heath uploaded the longer thin snake image featuring the text "Bitches be like just a salad please. I am too fat" (shown below, left). The post received 67 upvoted in five years. The second close-up image of a snake squinting was first posted to r/photoshopbattles^[2] by Redditor funny-lookin-stain on December 17th, 2016 (shown below, right). The image accumulated over 10,000 points (93% upvoted) in two years.

December 17th, 2016, Redditor WetCoastLife replied to the r/photoshopbattles^[2] post with a Rango edit (shown below, left). The comment gained over 1,600 points in two years. Redditor thatgreenbassguy also replied to the post with an edit of the snake holding up paper dolls (shown below, right). The edit accumulated over 400 points in two years.

On December 26th, 2016. Redditor B1gWh17 posted the close up snake image to r/JoeRogan^[3] calling the image "Skeptical Snake" which garnered over 200 points (95% upvoted) in two years. On March 12th, 2018, Redditor Salt_is_Enough posted the same image to r/memes^[4] with the caption, "When ur having a nice time catching up with an old friend but you think you might feel a pyramid scheme pitch coming" (shown below, left). The post gained over 500 points (99% upvoted) in a year.

On September 30th, 2019, Twitter user @41Strange tweeted two photographs of the snake, with the tweet receiving over 18,000 retweets and 78,000 likes in one week.^[6] In the thread, multiple users responded with humorous edits of the images (shown below).^[7]^[8]

In the following days, the images received significant spread on Twitter and Reddit as reaction images.