About

Then Perish is a phrase often accompanied by a red filtered image of former president Barack Obama, which is typically featured in various screenshots of mock text message conversations online.

Origin

On August 17th, 2017, Tumblr user Spooky-Grimwhoire posted a series of screenshots of a role-play text message conversation in which a person replies with a red-tinted picture of Barack Obama and the message "Then perish" in response to a person texting in hewwo-style speech (shown below). It gathered upwards of 133,000 notes.^[1]

Spread

On August 23rd, 2017, Tumblr user Mindfulwrath^[2] posted a text post which read:

honestly “i’ll do whatever you want” “then perish” is the single most powerful exchange possible in the english language and it’s from some bizarre “hewwo” obama rp

The post gained over 237,000 notes. On September 3rd, Redditor urmomlolroasted^[3] posted a screenshot of Mindfulwrath's post along with several reblogs to /r/tumblr, gaining over 550 upvotes. The image began being applied with other text post scenarios on Tumblr. On October 22nd, 2017, Tumblr user chantosakura^[4] used the image with an image of a cute animal in the washing machine in a post that has over 83,000 notes (shown below, left). On October 27th, Tumblr user tomatomagica^[5] uploaded a parody of the original post using characters from Homestar Runner, gaining over 1,300 notes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

External References