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The REAL Story Behind 10 Popular Internet Memes

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Ten photographs never meant to leave a hard drive turned their subjects into the internet’s most recognizable faces.

TheThings Celebrity’s video “The Real Story Behind 10 Popular Internet Memes” tracks down the actual people behind the image macros that flooded forums, group chats, and comment sections for years. The breakdown moves past the captions and gets into who took the photo, why, and how a private moment ended up on Reddit and 4chan with millions of strangers writing jokes over it. What emerges is a pattern: nearly every one of these images started as something completely ordinary — a MySpace snapshot, a school photo, a beach trip — before the internet stripped away the context entirely.

• “Scumbag Steve” traces back to a 2006 photo Blake Boston’s mother took of him and posted to MySpace, which didn’t go viral until Reddit picked it up in January 2011.
• “Bad Luck Brian” started as a deliberate joke during 2006 class picture day for Kyle Craven, but sat unused until his childhood friend Ian Davies uploaded it to Reddit in 2012.
• “Success Kid” comes from a 2007 beach photo of 11-month-old Sammy Griner clutching a fistful of sand, shot by his mother Laney Griner for personal keepsake purposes.

The Rapper Behind Scumbag Steve

Before he was internet shorthand for entitled, mooching behavior, Blake Boston was an aspiring Boston-area rapper going by “Weezy B” with a group called Beantown Mafia. His mother snapped the now-infamous photo — tilted cap, fur-trimmed coat — in 2006 and put it up on MySpace like any other profile picture of the era. It sat there for years with zero meme baggage attached. The video lays out how that changed the moment the image resurfaced on Reddit in January 2011, where users started pairing it with captions about borrowing gas money and never paying it back.

The Contest Video That Became a Relationship Cliché

“Overly Attached Girlfriend” has a cleaner origin story than most: college student Laina Morris filmed a comedic parody of Justin Bieber’s “Boyfriend” for a fan contest in June 2012, intentionally holding a wide-eyed, unblinking stare for laughs. The internet grabbed a screenshot from her own bit and ran with it, turning her deliberate performance into shorthand for clingy partners everywhere — which is a strange twist given she was in on the joke from the start.

A School Photo Joke That Outlived Everyone’s Memory of It

Kyle Craven’s braces-and-plaid portrait wasn’t an accident either — it was staged as a bit on class picture day back in 2006. The photo lived quietly for six years until his childhood friend Ian Davies uploaded it to Reddit in 2012, where the “Bad Luck Brian” format took off almost instantly, pairing Craven’s grinning face with captions describing the worst possible luck imaginable.

Zoë Roth’s smirk during a controlled fire department burn in Mebane, North Carolina — captured by her own father in 2005 — became “Disaster Girl” years before she’d ever posted anything online herself.

Disaster Girl and Success Kid Never Asked for the Job

Dave Roth was photographing his daughter Zoë near a local fire department’s training burn in 2005 when she turned and smirked at the camera at exactly the wrong — or right — moment. That single frame became “Disaster Girl,” slapped onto every image of chaos and destruction the internet could find. Success Kid followed a similar path: Laney Griner photographed her son Sammy at 11 months old on a beach in 2007, catching him mid-fistful of sand. Internet users recast that fist as a universal gesture of triumph, completely divorced from the toddler who was just playing in the sand.

Reddit and 4chan Redefined Context

The throughline in all ten cases is the same: candid photos taken for scrapbooks, MySpace pages, or inside jokes got picked up by communities on Reddit and 4chan and rebuilt into archetypes with nothing to do with the original moment. None of these subjects set out to become recognizable — the closest thing to intent was Laina Morris’s contest video, and even that got reinterpreted into something she hadn’t scripted. It’s the same dynamic that shows up whenever ordinary people get thrust into internet fame without warning, the kind of unplanned exposure covered in stories about people whose careers got upended by social media — except here, the people behind the memes mostly just had to live with the caption, not the consequences.

What’s stuck with all five of these subjects is that the photos keep circulating decades after they were taken, long after MySpace and the original context are gone. Blake Boston has talked about trying to license “Scumbag Steve” for use in ads rather than fight the meme; Kyle Craven has done the same with “Bad Luck Brian.” The image outlives the moment every time — which is really the only consistent rule the internet has ever followed with these ten photos.