With a sizable 358.5K followers, the “Images that MIGHT be cursed” page shows just how much people are drawn to things they can’t exactly understand. And if you have been on the internet for any substantial amount of time, you have most likely encountered similar content, including spin-offs such as “blessed memes” and the weird, hybrid, “blursed memes.”
This points to the fact that people don’t just look at images for information or aesthetics, often enough what they really want are “feelings,” which, in the parlance of the internet, are often described as an “aura” or “vibes.” This is particularly interesting to observe from the side because it can be hard to actually put these ideas into words.
While the concept is no doubt older, one of the first places to formulate the concept of a cursed meme is none other than Tumblr. In 2015, an account called, unsurprisingly, “CursedImages” began to post pics that are in many ways reminiscent of the ones visible here. Interestingly, the account still exists to this day.
Within a year, the concept had spread out of Tumblr to other platforms, an indication that there was a reasonable amount of demand for what could have been a very niche sort of topic. By 2016, the idea of cursed images was so popular that major publications, like The New Yorker and Gizmodo, had articles on it.
That same year, a still popular subreddit, r/cursed images was created, which is still going strong. It has about 1.5 million users tuning in every day. Similarly, “cursed” images continued their spread across the internet, with cursed emojis, songs, gifs, videos, and even food. Indeed, like some sort of novice magicians, people were discovering that practically anything could be cursed.
For example, if you like your cursed content layered, you can always dig through the comments section to find more. Indeed, “cursed comments” are practically their own genre on the internet now, with people competing to see who can elicit a bigger groan from the reader. If you want to try your hand at this post, go for it, but the effect might be amplified with more “conventional” content.
In short, a cursed comment is one that attempts to alter the context of an image to be “worse,” from inserting off-color dialogue to adding context worthy of a horror story. It’s a delicate balance between going too far and jumping the shark to just writing something vaguely offensive. But this tends to be true for most things in life.
