About

Smug Trap is an exploitable photoshop series based on an image showing of a young girl wearing a smug expression, which are typically edited with characters from a variety of different fandoms.

Origin

On May 23rd, 2018, Twitter user Pas (paxiti)^[1] uploaded a short comic about a person wearing girl's clothes^[2] needing to use the restroom. They opt for the Men's Room, hoping that they will not be seen using the urinal in those clothes. Once inside the men's room, they find another person in girl's clothes using the urinal. The second person makes the smug face, implying that they share a common experience. The first four parts of the comic received 31,000 likes in the following months, while the last four got 5,300.

Spread

The meme spread on 4chan and Reddit, most notably to /r/Animemes and other anime and manga-related subreddits. On September 11th, 2018, Redditor Mini_Knight^[2] uploaded an RTX Off / RTX On version of the image, comparing a normal image of Ai Kizuna with a Smug Trap edit; this image received 8600 upvotes. In the following days, Mini_Knight uploaded multiple variants that got thousands of upvotes portraying the characters Ochako Uraraka from My Hero Academia, Bowsette, and Earth-chan, (shown below right).

On September 24th, /r/Animemes user Frocharocha^[3] posted a version of the meme mixing a Bowsette version of the image with the Its Smug Aura Mocks Me portraing meme. This image obtained 950 upvotes.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References