Unpopular Opinion Puffin

Confirmed 393,399

Part of a series on Advice Animals. [View Related Entries]

About

Unpopular Opinion Puffin is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photograph of a baby puffin^[1] and various captions conveying opinions that are thought to be unpopular, in similar vein to other non-conformist advice animal characters like Confession Bear and Angry Walter.

Origin

According to an email sent to our site by the Imgur user Daemoos, the photographer of the original stock photo (shown below, left) is Andreas Mulder^[16], a student in Netherlands. The image has been included in a photography book, early titled as "Silly Walk".

The image appeared online as early as July 2010 on That Cute Site.^[2] On July 24th, 2013, it was used as an image macro for the first time in a submission to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[3] subreddit. In the post, the OP suggested using it as an alternative to Confession Bear, which had been frequently used on the subreddit as a way to express an unpopular opinion disguised as a confession.

Spread

Before the image had become an image macro, the uncaptioned image was submitted to a number of subreddits in 2012 including /r/aww^[4], /r/pics^[5] and /r/PhotoshopBattles.^[6] In February 2013, the photo was submitted to /r/aww^[7] a second time. On August 23rd, an Unpopular Opinion Puffin supporting the announcement of Ben Affleck's role in the latest Batman film^[8] (shown below) hit the front page of Reddit, gaining more than 22,000 upvotes, 1,600 points overall and 900 comments within two months. In late September 2013, the subreddit/r/UOPuffin^[9] was created. Over the course of the following month, Unpopular Opinion Puffin instances appeared on 9gag^[10], Meme Dad^[11], Memebase^[12] and FunnyJunk.^[13]

Notable Examples

As of October 2013, there are more than 250 search results for "Unpopular Opinion Puffin" on Reddit.^[14] Additionally, more than 450 instances have been submitted to MemeGen.^[15]