Godzilla Had a Stroke Trying to Read This and F*cking Died is an absurdist copypasta and meme referencing a BTS photo from 1992's Godzilla vs. Mothra, in which Godzilla is seen lying in a wheelbarrow. Versions of the meme have become popular ways to poke fun at typos and writing errors, though, similar to the Garfield Why Do They Call It Oven? copypasta, its nonsensical nature can be seen as a precursor to the brain rot memes of the early 2020s.
The image that prompted the Godzilla Had a Stroke Trying to Read This and Fucking Died meme came from a collection of behind-the-scenes photos from 1992's Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth.
The photos were shared by Gizmodo in late August 2012, and later that month were shared to the r/movies sub on Reddit. One of the photos depicted Godzilla lying in a wheelbarrow.
In the mid-2010s, jokes about hard-to-read text online were met with a new response. Comments would read, "I just had a stroke." This is meant to indicate that something is hard to understand and in 2018, a subreddit titled r/ihadastroke appeared.
The photo and copypasta appeared together for the first time in an iFunny post shared by user Alpha_Grizzly on May 24, 2019.
Within months, the meme appeared on r/ihadastroke, where it began to spread and gain more frequent use.
In addition to the use of the meme, Godzilla Had a Stroke Trying to Read This and F*cking Died has become a copypasta reaction comment found across social media. It appears in two ways. For one, it calls out text posts that contain a lot of misspellings. In another sense, the copypasta slickly points out nonsensical things.
The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here to get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.
Sign up to receive the Daily Dot’s Internet Insider newsletter for urgent news from the frontline of online.
The post ‘Godzilla Had a Stroke Trying to Read This and F*cking Died’: how the copypasta and meme blew up appeared first on The Daily Dot.
