The Obunga meme depicts a photoshopped image of the 44th President of the United States Barack Obama altered to resemble roach creatures from the manga Terra Formars. It has been described as a cursed image by many across the internet. Often, the image is accompanied by horror music from Five Nights at Freddy’s.
The exact origin of the photoshopped Obama image that became Obunga is not currently known, but the earliest known appearance of it was on 4chan and submitted to the /tv/ board on July 24, 2013. In case you’re seeing the term 4chan and looking at the image, you’ve probably drawn the conclusion that many have, which is that this thing is racist as hell.
Obung spread from its original /tv/ home on 4chan three years later on March 29th, 2016, migrating to the /v/ board, which centers around video games. It was uploaded under the file name Juhrack Johbama.jpg.
The image made its way to YouTube on February 14th, 2018, when user Homosneksual posted a video entitled Obunga.mov. The clip featured the titular image, accompanied by the “new round” sound effect from Call of Duty: World at War.
A few months later, on June 11th, the marriage of image and iconic music was made official, when Obunga hit YouTube set to the music from Five Nights at Freddy’s. It was posted by user Maguku. Throughout that month, Obunga saw an explosion in its popularity, partially due to its now-frequent appearances on Instagram, particularly in screamer videos. (You know the type…some of us are still recovering from that “Thriller” one.)
On June 15th, 2018, the Obunga/Freddy’s collab showed up on Instagram, posted by user @bepis.man. It gained 31k views and 3.2k likes to date.
Three days later, on June 21st, 2018, @bepis.man posted a similar meme on Instagram that found a similarly large audience, snagging 44k views and 5k likes.
June, 2018 continued to be the month of Obunga, as on the 27th, everyone’s favorite streamer PewDiePie posted a video all about Obunga, titled "OBUNGA ????ELAS ???????????????????????? GIRL.” On the strength of the PewDiePie brand, the video saw more than 2.7 million views and 35.2k comments within 24 hours of its posting!
But the month of Obunga was not yet complete. On June 28th, Obunga made a splash on yet another platform, appearing on Reddit via poster CharlotteNetherlands, who submitted a captioned variation on the image to group (sigh) /r/okbuddyretard, (It has since been removed.)
The post garnered over 1000 points, with 60 comments in the first 15 hours. At the same time, an image showed up on r/dankmemes uploaded by TheMemeKid making the image resemble the character Sans from video game Undertale.
Four years after its rise to prominence, Obaga regained some popularity online In Summer 2022, where it appeared as a bot in the NextBot Chase Garry’s Mod game. However, the mod had been submitted to Steam Workshop back during the height of Obunga-mania, on July 2nd, 2018 by user The Globfather.
Branching out of NextBot, the mod appeared in several viral videos on YouTube and TikTok. For instance, July 6th, 2022 featured a post by YouTuber Whitt of a gameplay video, which gained over 2.6 million views in its first three weeks,
Two weeks later, YouTuber GirthQuake posted another mod-centric video titled “Obunga is actually horrifying,” which gained 263k views in its first week.
Obunga made its way to Roblox on August 4th, 2022. However, it was removed a month-and-a-half later on September 19th of that same year. Why? According to Roblox moderation, Obunga, along with a few other mods, were removed due to being deemed “discriminatory content.” All Obunga images in the game were instantly replaced by Tbh.
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