“Overly Attached Girlfriend” Meme, Explained

Well, that was fast. June 7th, we posted the video of a girl doing a creepy cover of Justin Bieber’s “Boyfriend,” and it has already spawned an internet meme. Ladies and gentlemen, we present “Overly Attached Girlfriend.” Let’s begin with the video that launch a thousand image macros.

Simply titled “JB Fanvideo,” this video was created as an entry in Justin Bieber’s “Girlfriend” contest. The contest itself was a brilliant marketing move, tying together Bieber’s hit single “Boyfriend” and the frangrance he’s selling “Girlfriend.” He asked his fans to submit Girlfriend versions of “Boyfriend,” and his favorites would be played during a television special toward the end of June. Our heroine’s response? Challenge accepted.  She created a version of the song filled with the kind of lyrics that in any other context might have resulted in a restraining order, and her facial expressions could chill your soul. It was a masterpiece of parody. Next came the image macros.

You can thank Reddit for the spread of the Quickmeme-based image macros. Reddit is a crucible for everything internet, so once it got a hold of the video, the quick-witted brains of Reddit almost immediately sprang into action, pouring “Advice Animal” images into Reddit beginning June 7th and accelerating through the 8th, bearing the name “Overly Attached Girlfriend.” These worked for the same reason the video worked: Youtuber WZR0713’s facial expressions were amazingly insane. Almost any still from the video would’ve worked

All of this happened so quickly. In less than 48 hours, this girl had gone from relative anonymity to having had her video viewed 2 million times and becoming an instant-classic internet meme. At some point, someone even created a Twitter account @attachedGF based on her image.It links to a Tumblr archive of these images and is filled with awesome tweets like “Doesn’t spit or swallow. SAVES.” and “That’s what she said? WHO’S SHE?”

We expect this meme to thrive as image macros. We’ve seen crazy girl and crazy guy videos before, but those are extremely hard to duplicate whereas creating one of these images just requires Photoshop or a visit to Quickmeme. We look forward to more because we are smitten with Overly Attached Girlfriend… which was her plan all along.