About

The Floor Is… refers to an exploitable two-panel photo series featuring showing a person avoiding the floor, as they would in The Floor Is Lava / Hot Lava Game. It has been used to make image macros about actions that one person will try their best to avoid doing.

Origin

The original two pics came from Twitter user @princessofwifi,^[1] who on April 24th, 2016, posted the two images with a caption about wanting to sleep early, only to sleep very late (shown below).

Spread

On June 7th, 2017, Twitter account @HELL2U^[3] posted a similar picture where the person is Hirohiko Araki and the caption reads "the floor is writing a coherent story without plot holes" (shown below, left). The tweet has 1,417 retweets and over 1,900 likes. On June 9th, a Facebook page named Lucas – From Out of Nowhere^[2] posted an image where the person is covered with a Nintendo logo, featuring a caption that says "The floor is Mother 3 localization." This gained 649 reacts and 408 shares so far (shown below, right).

On June 8th, 2017, a Twitter user @Zela_Kantal^[4] posted an edited version of the two pictures featuring actual lava. This tweet gains 14.7k retweets and 30k likes (shown below, left). Around this time, the image began to grow popular on Reddit. A post on June 12th where the images are edited to make commentary on Reddit as a platform on free speech gained over 5,700 points on /r/MemeEconomy (shown below, right). Dozens more edits were posted to /r/MemeEconomy as the template continued to trend.

As the "The Floor Is…" memes grew in popularity, people online began to parody the meme, posting image macros in which the subject breaks the floor. On June 14th, the Facebook account Zesty Supreme Meme posted an image of a man whose head is planted into concrete. The image caption reads, "The floor is fireflies by owl city." Within a week, the image received more than 19,000 reactions, 23,000 shares and 8,600 comments.^[5]

Over the next week, a variety of parodies emerged. On June 20th, several of them appeared on the /r/DankMemes subreddit. Much like the original "The Floor Is," these are two panel image macros. In the first panel, a boy with an image or text photoshopped over his face jumps, and in the second panel, the boy put a hole in the ground (examples below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

*Editor's Note: Data Skewed by #TheFloorIsLavaChallenge

External References