Earlier this year, a “Forever Alone fail” pic showed a gentleman in a suit, sleeping. The text read that his girlfriend took the snap. However, you could see his feet in the mirror holding a smartphone. Over the weekend in Japan, that photo has created a viral sensation.
As Know Your Meme points out, this image is part of the larger “Caught Me Sleeping” meme. The above pic originally hit Tumblr in March and quickly went viral. Online, this faux sleeping selfie was soon labelled a “Forever Alone fail”.
On Saturday, the Joon Sung image started making the internet rounds through Japanese cyberspace after Twitter user PFC.Stick13ear uploaded the image, which was retweeted over two thousand times.
Then on Sunday, another Twitter user, @25nozomi25, uploaded her gag take on the fail. The Japanese text reads: “My boyfriend took this photo of me while I was sleeping lol Love him so much lol”. After that, “Forever Alone” is written in English. The image has been retweeted over 20 thousand times.
“Forever Alone” is a Western internet meme. It’s interesting to see it get picked up, remixed, and spread elsewhere online.
In Japan, this latest “Caught Me Sleeping” has also helped to inspire fan art, further reworkings, and perhaps a greater appreciation of foot-based photography.
Pictures: PFC.Stick13ear, 25nozomi25, Takahisakan, Yogoto, Tomato Mute
Comments
17 responses to “‘Forever Alone Fail’ Wins Over Japan”
I’m pretty sure the correct title is “bae caught me slippin”.
This isn’t game news and this isn’t new.
Ashcraft, you are the Today/Tonight of game journalism.
Slow news day hey…lol
Just standard Bashcraft fare, he seems to think that anything Japanese is automatically related to gaming.
No, he seems to think that it’s related to Kotaku.
Kotaku. Otaku. Do you know what Otaku is? Do you think it is a coincidence that the site’s name is similar to that? Have you read the ‘about’ page, to see that the site is NOT purely gaming, but about things of interest to gamers?
Annoys me, every time I see a post which is basically whining, “Videogames!” when the ‘Japanese-culture’ side of Kotaku is serviced.
Directly quoting from the ‘about’ page:
At Kotaku Australia, we’re carefully trying to build a reputation for creating the strongest, most engaging content surrounding games and gaming culture.
We cover the Australian gaming industry with a team of award-winning local journalists, and localise the best posts from the US, making sure to eliminate what’s irrelevant for Aussies
I think the complaints are legitimate – there seems to be a lot of non-gaming content posted, especially on ‘slow news days’. Perhaps Kotaku should create an ‘Off-topic’ section for the non-gaming stuff, would make it a bit easier to identify relevant content for users.
How about you come up with a cool name for the site, and then feel justified that nothing Japanese related should be here. If you can…
They went the other way (on the US site) and created a “Kotaku-Core” tag for articles to do with the “core” Kotaku focus of videogames.
Amen!
I don’t mind this coming under “gaming culture”, absolutely no problem with that. My problem is that it’s lazy. So lazy that barely anything here can be called original content anymore. I mean, is it really just a coincidence that Kotaku want to champion how they cover a breadth of topics and then we see the same story posted on every one of its sister sites with only a few days between. It would be easier not to be vocal about these changes over the last few years if the articles were well-written, researched and were devoid of the obvious click-baiting attributes but the truth is that they’re glorified blog posts. If that wasn’t enough, some of these writers even lift blog posts word for word. (Properly referenced of course) It’s not “basically whining” just because you didn’t understand exactly what people are complaining about. Your time is being wasted and you’re being swindled if you come here unaware of the way Kotaku generates its content. Kotaku went from raising the bar to setting it lower than any other site i’ve seen in recent years. (Not that I know every site) I think most people just want to see Kotaku pull itself out of the hole it’s sunk into.
Also, Kotaku should make a sub-genre called ‘Fap-able’..
Do you know what an Otaku is? I am legitimately asking because an otaku is someone who is very knowledgeable about and obsessed, sometimes to the point of mania, with a particular topic. Examples of this are things like Video Game Otaku, Car Otaku, Mecha Otaku, Anime Otaku and Gun Otaku. In the West, people tend to use it incorrectly to define people who are specifically into manga, anime and eastern video games purely because that’s how those people refer to themselves.
So, given that the word on its own is pretty meaningless without an association with a particular topic, what exactly are we to infer from Ko-Otaku (The “ko” prefix meaning a small version of it)?
Agreed. It might be a slow news day, but still made me chuckle at my desk
I’m pretty sure the original photo is also a piss take, c’mon, the guy’s feet are so prominent in the photo it’s gotta be a joke. The meme has been around a while and it’s there’s already a lot of set-up recreations of it.
Exactly, it’s so obviously a joke. The drones just want to feel smart that they ‘figured it out’ when that dude is on a meta level.
Or maybe the drones know it’s fake but pretend not to in order to make us call them out for thinking its real to … oh dear I’ve gone cross eyed
Did anyone stop to think that maybe his feet ARE his girlfriend?
How is that even possible, I am oddly interested.