2012·The social era
Bad Luck Brian
The deliberately terrible school photograph that became the internet's patron saint of misfortune.
A meme
This Moment began as a photograph, not as a video. Originally published on Reddit.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNo longer publicly available
What this was
A high-school yearbook portrait: plaid sweater vest, braces, a grin held far too wide. Kyle Craven pulled the face on purpose, and his friend Ian Davies posted the scan to Reddit in 2012. Captioned in the Advice Animals format — a hopeful first line, a catastrophic second — it became the standard image for a small disaster.
It first appeared in 2012, during the social era.
Bad Luck Brian is the high-water mark of the Advice Animals era, the period when a single captioned photograph was the internet's whole comic language. It is also one of the handful of memes whose subject was a willing participant: Craven has given interviews about it for over a decade, including to the Washington Post on what it is like when the meme that made you famous starts to fade.
Craven licensed the image, made a modest living from it, and in 2021 sold it as an NFT during the meme gold rush that also took in Disaster Girl and Overly Attached Girlfriend. It remains one of the most recognised faces on the internet belonging to somebody almost nobody can name.
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Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. What it began as is recorded here, and what is shown is a later copy.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment began as a photograph, not as a video. Originally published on Reddit.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- A high-school yearbook portrait: plaid sweater vest, braces, a grin held far too wide. Kyle Craven pulled the face on purpose, and his friend Ian Davies posted the scan to Reddit in 2012. Captioned in the Advice Animals format — a hopeful first line, a catastrophic second — it became the standard image for a small disaster.
Where this survives
The same thing, held on another platform. Each link says what that copy is; none of them is claimed to be the original, and Share above stays with ViralWorld either way.
- View this upload on Reddit not playable