About
You vs. The Guy She Told You Not to Worry About is a series of captioned images comparing two male subjects or fictional characters side-by-side, with the one on the right being the more desirable suitor of the two. In August 2016, the meme spawned hundreds of iterations after going viral on Twitter.
Origin
The earliest known instance of this kind of tweet was posted by @AmBlujay[1] on October 25th, 2015, shown below. As of August 8th, 2016, the tweet has almost 4,000 retweets and 1,550 likes.
Spread
The tweet format was copied a few times in the following month, but became a Twitter fad on August 7th, 2016, when tweets using the joke format featuring pop culture references[5][6] and meme icons like Harambe[3]and Guy Fieri[4] gained thousands of retweets. The spike in the trend made “you vs. the guy she told you not to worry about” a “Twitter moment.”[2] On August 9th, The Daily Dot[7] covered it, calling it “fragile masculinity as a meme.”
Various Examples
Search Interest
External References
[2]Twitter – ‘The guy she tells you not to worry about’ is a meme sensation
[3]Twitter – @ProdigyNelson
[4]Twitter – @the_faisalahmed
[5]Twitter- @HndrixLamar
[7]The Daily Dot – ‘You vs. the guy she tells you not to worry about’ is fragile masculinity as a meme