When the Ship Makes Me Uncomfy

About

When the Ship Makes Me Uncomfy refers to a series of memes about shipping based on the Smiling Buck-Tooth Emoji. Spawned by a meme about upsetting shipping in May 2024, the format achieved virality in September 2024 with ironic recaptions.

Origin

On May 11th, 2024, TikTok^[1] user @cykikx posted a meme about shipping in fandoms based on the Smiling Buck-Tooth Emoji along with several other images and animations, captioned, "when the ship is so absolutely nonsensical, disgusting hard to look at, upsetting, and vomit inducing but it's not illegal so people ship it." The video (shown below) garnered over 1.1 million views and 201,000 likes in four months.

Spread

On May 25th, 2024, X^[2] user @_0peachii posted a screenshot of the post along with a user comment reading "rarepairs and cross ships," writing, "oh my god you are so miserable." The post (shown below) accumulated over 1,200 reposts and 8,900 likes in four months.

On August 31st, 2024, X^[3] user @weebtrashlife posted a similar meme about shipping based on the emoji, which gained over 22,000 reposts and 125,000 likes on the platform in three weeks (shown below).

The post inspired a trend in the following days as users humorously recaptioned the meme. Notably, on September 2nd, 2024, X^[4] user @toyrobots recaptioned the meme, adding the punchline, "and I choose to kill everyone." The post (shown below) received over 9,500 reposts and 46,000 likes in three weeks.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References