About

Sorry, That Was a Strange Thing to Ask is a quote from the Attack on Titan anime which has been turned into an exploitable meme template. In the template, the character Erwin approaches the protagonist Eren and asks him something before closing his eyes and saying "Sorry, that was a strange thing to ask." What he asked is changed in the exploitables.

Origin

The scene comes from episode 15 of the Attack on Titan anime, which aired July 20th, 2013.^[1] An english dub of the scene is shown below, though the translation shows the character Erwin saying "Forgive me. Loaded question."

Spread

The scene began being parodied shortly after it aired. One of the earliest parodies appeared on YouTube in a video by KegMinami on December 17th, 2013 (shown below).

In the description for the video, KegMinami said he based the video off a picture he saw. While the origin for that picture is unknown, a picture with the same text appeared on Facebook page Wings, Roses, and Unicorns on March 15th, 2014 (shown below). KegMinami made a similar video based off another variation of the meme which asked a philosophical question about fish in space (shown below, right).

The template continued to see use over the following four years. More recent popular examples include a post to /r/Animemes from February 8th, 2018, that gained over 480 upvotes (shown below, left), and another posted February 4th that gained over 520 upvotes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References