What Was "The Incident" At Your High School?

About

What Was "The Incident" At Your High School? refers to an engagement bait post common on Twitter / X that was tweeted by many users on the app as a way to bait engagement, replies and quotes, due to an "incident" (as in, a notorious event) occurring at most high schools. The blatant copying of the post by many users over several years, as well as the mass perception of it being bait, led to parody usage in which meme creators replaced "high school" with a different setting or scenario in a snowclone called "What Was 'The Incident' At Your X?" The parodies referenced other memes or subcultures like TV and movies. The settings became increasingly absurd over time, peaking in usage in 2023. Regardless of ironic usage, the prompt often gained viral responses about allegedly real "incidents," originally starting with viral Reddit posts on /r/AskReddit in the late 2010s.

Origin

On September 30th, 2014, Redditor Formicidae_hony posted to /r/AskReddit,^[1] writing, "What was banned in your school because of a crazy incident?" gaining roughly 11,000 upvotes in nine years (shown below, top). The post is currently the first-known form of the viral question. About a year later, on December 30th, 2015, a since-deleted Redditor asked /r/teenagers^[2] "What was 'the incident' at your school this year?" gaining over 70 upvotes in eight years (shown below, bottom). The post is currently the first-known upload of what the later, well-known format "What was 'the incident' at your X?"

Spread

Variations of the prompt "What was 'the incident' at your high school?" continued to surface on Reddit going into the late 2010s. For instance, the first, viral utterance happened on October 17th, 2016, when a since deleted Redditor asked /r/AskReddit,^[3] "What was 'the incident' at your school?" gaining roughly 20,700 upvotes in seven years. The post gained several top comments, like one from Redditor^[4] strugglebusdriver437 that gained roughly 8,300 upvotes in seven years (shown below).

On February 11th, 2020, Redditor ramennyun asked /r/AskReddit,^[5] "What was 'the incident' in your high school?" gaining roughly 48,200 upvotes in three years. The post gained viral top comments, such as one from Redditor^[6] Mad_as_a_Lorry which received roughly 45,000 upvotes in three years (shown below, left) and gained viral reposts on Instagram^[7][8] years later, including an I Love Democracy meme posted in May 2020 by Instagram^[9] user @quantum_infinity, gaining over 144,300 likes in three years (shown below, right).

On Twitter / X

On October 25th, 2022, X^[10] user @ysiraels posted the question with a generic photo of a high school, gaining roughly 28,400 likes in 11 months (shown below, left). The post gained viral discourse as well as parodies soon after, with the first-known posted by X^[11] user @neko_girl92 on October 28th, 2022, gaining over 680 likes in 11 months (shown below, right).

Parodies of the format continued to surface going into 2023, satirizing and ridiculing users who continued to post the same question and "high school" image in a seemingly vapid style of posting. For instance, on May 25th, 2023, X^[12] user @quebecween compared the meme to the Apple's Best Feature meme (a similarly ridiculed phenomenon), gaining roughly 1,100 likes in five months (shown below, left). On August 18th, 2023, X^[13] user @therapistLloyd referenced the plot of The Thing in a post, gaining roughly 32,600 likes in one month (shown below, right).

Going into late 2023, parody usage of the phrasal template continued to go viral on X.^[14]

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References