Overly Attached Girlfriend

About

Overly Attached Girlfriend is an advice animal image macro featuring webcam picture of a girl and various captions portraying her in the stereotype of an overprotective and clingy girlfriend.

Origin

On June 6th, 2012, YouTuber wzr0713 uploaded a webcam video titled “JB Fanvideo”^[1] in which she performs a parody rendition of Justin Bieber’s latest single “Boyfriend” with personalized lyrics. According to Gawker’s article^[2], the video was submitted in response to Bieber’s announcement of an online sing-off contest^[3] in promoting his celebrity perfume “Girlfriend.”

If I was your girlfriend / I’d never let you leave / without a small recording device / taped under your sleeve
I’ll always be checking up on you / Hey, boy, who you talking to? / Spend a day with your girl, I’ll be calling you my husband.”

YouTuber wzr0713’s parody song, marked by its clingly, stalker-like lyrics, instantly drew attention from the viewers on YouTube and Reddit, many of whom wondered about the girl’s true intention behind making the video. In less than 48 hours of upload, the video received more than 1.35 million views.

Spread

On the following day of June 7th, Redditor yeahhtoast submitted a link to the YouTube video in a thread titled “Overly Attached Girlfriend,”^[11] which generated more than 800 comments in the span of seven hours as well as a Quickmeme page^[7] for an advice animal character bearing the same name.

Meanwhile, many Redditors and YouTubers commented that the advice animal character of “Overly Attached Girlfriend” was nearly identical to an older image macro series known as Crazy Girlfriend Praying Mantis.

Both the video and online reactions were subsequently picked up by numerous internet culture blogs like The Daily What^[13] Guyism^[4], BuzzFeed^[6], Jezebel^[5] and Daily Dot^[12], not to mention its viral spread on Tumblr^[13] and Facebook. Later that same day, a parody Twitter account^[8] (@attachedGF) was launched to curate some of the notable captions from the series and a similar single topic Tumblr blog^[9] was created on the following day.