What Should We Call Me

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About

What Should We Call Me (snowclone: What Should We Call X) is a single topic blog which pairs everyday occurrences with an animated reaction GIF conveying a fitting reaction or a feeling projected by the poster in each given situation. Since its launch in February 2012, the blog has inspired dozens of spin-off sites that focus on a specific field of interest or occupation.

Origin

The Tumblr blog What Should We Call Me^[1] was started on February 6th, 2012 by two 24-year-old best friends who had recently parted ways to attend law schools in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, California. While chatting online one night, the pair decided to start a collaborative blog to stay in touch with each other during the school year.

While discussing their plan, the Californian friend accidentally typed “What should we call me?” in naming of the blog and they decided to go with the awkward phrase for the blog's name.^[2] The first post paired a GIF animation from the Disney television show That’s So Raven^[3] featuring the titular character’s little brother talking about putting on his “eating pants” with the post title “When my best friend and I decide we’re not going out.”

Precursor: My Face When

The concept of using reaction faces as the punchline has been previously observed as early as November 2009 with my face when (>mfw) threads on 4chan and Reddit, which pairs greentext stories or everyday nuisances with a fitting reaction image.

Spread

On March 12th, the creators began a Twitter account^[4] for their Tumblr posts, which has gained more than 34,000 followers as of May 2012. On March 21st, the Huffington Post^[5] featured the site in their weekly post “7 Sites You Should Be Wasting Time On Right Now.” Eight days later, the creators were interviewed by Forbes^[2], in which they stated they never intended for the blog to become popular, they just wanted to make each other laugh.

Throughout the month of April, the blog was featured on women’s magazine Allure^[6] ,USA Today College^[10] and the Huffington Post^[8] a second time. On April 20th, the pair revealed that their blog had broken 100,000 followers.^[9] In addition, there is a Facebook fan page^[7] dedicated to the blog and some Tumblr users have begun posting GIF responses to their own situations with the tags #what should we call me^[11] or #wswcm.^[12]

Spin-off Blogs

Due to the blog’s easily replicable format, many parody blogs began appearing with the same stock Tumblr layout. On May 15th, Buzzfeed^[13] featured several of these blogs including What Should We Call Cats^[14] (below left), written from the perspective of cats, College Greeks^[15] (below center), for people who participate in fraternities and sororities and When in Austin^[16] (below right), for people from the city in Texas.