Swatch Berse

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About

Swatch Berse is a slang expression used to describe obese people who seem to possess an imposing presence, similar in meaning to Absolute Unit. Originating from a group chat in-joke, the expression was chosen as a name for a Facebook group posting images of such men and saw an increase in slang use in September 2019.

Origin

In a personal conversation with Know Your Meme, Twitter user @Duckalie stated that before November 9th, 2018, a member of an unidentified group chat messaged "any nugas sanna wspa end time swatch berse," a heavily misspelled suggestion for the other members of the chat to spend time watching Berserk anime series (screenshot of the conversation shown below).^[1] An image of a fat man was reportedly attached to the message.

On November 9th, 2019, Swatch berse Facebook meme group was created, with an image of Impactical Jokers cast member Sal Volcano posted on the same day (shown below).^[2]^[3]

Spread

Through the following year, the group posted multiple images of portly men and animals, both real and fictional. For example, a March 20th, 2019, post of a photo of an extremely muscular bull received 200 likes in seven months (shown below, left).^[4] A May 2nd, 2019, post of a photo of a professional CSGO player Dosia received over 110 likes in five months (shown below, right).^[5]

Starting in September 2019, the expression started wider getting recognition as a reference to obese men. For example, on September 25th, iFunny user Cavalier made a post containing photographs of obese and/or muscular people and animals which gained over 610 smiles in two weeks (shown below, left).^[6] On September 27th, 2019, eternal classic VK group posted an image of a Guts fan art by DeviantArt artist prisonsuit-rabbitman^[7] captioned "Berse," with the post gaining over 520 likes (shown below, right).^[8]