Someone Explain This Picture

Submission 37,287

About.

"Someone Explain This Picture" is an expression often used to caption screen captured images and animated GIFs from a variety of television series, urging viewers to provide a tongue-in-cheek description of what is occurring in the image.

Origin

On November 12th, 2014, Tumblr^[5] user "themaskednegro" highlighted a screen capture of a a WWE match in which the wrestlers are shown fighting on ladders, requesting those who are unfamiliar with wrestling attempt to explain what is happening in the image. Tumblr user teadalek responded to the post identifying the show as "competitive lightbulb replacement" (shown below). In the following five months, teadalek's reply has gathered more than 199.000 notes.^[4]

Spread

On December 24th, a screenshot of teadalek's post was submitted to Imgur,^[1] where it gained over 726,000 views and 5,251 points in four months. On March 14th, 2015, Tumblr user madohomos uploaded several screen captures from the TV series Steven Universe, followed by a request for people to explain the scene. Within one month, the post gathered more than 10.700 views^[3].

The post began developing into a snowclone in the coming months, where "wrestling" was replaced with another television show. On March 28th, 2015, user blargeybarble^[6] posted a version with Steven Universe that gained over 48,000 notes.

Over the following years, the snowclone appeared with several other television shows, leading to it to be documented by memearchives.^[7]