About

Toddposting refers to a series of shitposting featuring the game developer Todd Howard trying to advertise Bethesda Softworks' franchises, like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, in a mockingly blunt and non-sneaky way through photoshopped images of Howard.

Origin

Toddposting is believed to have started in 4chan's video game board /v/ during the summer of 2015, after Bethesda's E3 conference where details about Fallout 4 were announced. The earliest archived reference to Toddposting comes from a /vg/ Fallout thread on July 10th, 2015.^[1]

Spread

Toddposting began taking off in the summer of 2015. A photoshopped image of Howard was posted to Imgur on July 15th (shown below, left). An August 15th, 2015 post on /v/ portrayed Howard as a man scamming a sickness in order to get people to preorder Fallout 4 (shown below, right).

Toddposting continued throughout the following several years and was particularly emboldened by the multiple releases of Skyrim on multiple platforms (examples shown below). A subreddit for the trend has 150 subscribers.^[3]

Additionally, the trend has been parodied in various YouTube videos. For example, a "/v/ The Musical" parody uploaded by vodkaowl on October 6th, 2016, gained over 68,000 views (shown below, left). A parody uploaded by halflife2man on July 14th, 2017 gained over 8,600 views (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References