Are Were Once They Are Did
"Are Were Once They Are Did" is a nonsensical copypasta template that spread across Twitter / X in September 2025. The format follows a mock-official announcement structure where a celebrity or brand "confirms" something using deliberately meaningless grammar. It started in music stan communities before jumping to gaming, anime, and brand accounts within days.
Overview
The "Are Were Once They Are Did" meme uses a fill-in-the-blank template designed to mimic the tone of a breathless industry announcement while saying absolutely nothing1. The standard format reads: "🚨 [Person/Brand] confirms [Product/Album] are were once they are did. They became the first ever to have the first as in the era of that when of a physical streaming and the media began. Congratulations ❤️"3. Every word is technically English, but strung together the sentence collapses into pure gibberish. That incoherence is the entire joke. Users plug in their favorite artists, games, or brands to create fake "breaking news" posts that look important at first glance but dissolve into word soup on closer reading1.
The earliest known use of the phrase appeared on September 17, 2025, when X user @opiumoon posted about singer Ethel Cain: "🚨 Ethel Cain confirms 'Willoughby Tucker' and 'Perverts' are were once they are did. They became the first ever to have the first as in the era of that when of a physical streaming and the media began. Congratulations ❤️"3. The post picked up a modest 11 likes in its first week.
The same day, X user @SCVRLETBAE posted a version featuring Doja Cat alongside an image of the singer: "🚨 Doja Cat confirms 'Scarlet 2 CLAUDE' and 'Vie' are were once they are did"1. This post hit much harder, pulling in over 6,000 likes and 200,000 views within a week3. PhilSTAR Life identified the @SCVRLETBAE post (dated September 18 in their reporting) as one of the earliest examples to go wide1.
Both posts came out of music fandom circles on Stan Twitter, where users regularly post hyperbolic praise about their favorite artists3.
Origin & Background
How It Spread
How to Use This Meme
The template is straightforward to fill in:
Pick a person, brand, or creator as the "announcer"
Pick one or two of their works (albums, games, products)
Drop them into the format: "🚨 [Name] confirms '[Work 1]' and '[Work 2]' are were once they are did. They became the first ever to have the first as in the era of that when of a [relevant industry] streaming and the media began. Congratulations ❤️"
The word before "streaming" is typically swapped to match the subject. Music posts use "physical," gaming posts use "digital" or "physical gaming," and so on.
Cultural Impact
Fun Facts
The phrase has zero literal meaning. It's designed to look like a coherent sentence while being complete nonsense, which is the entire source of its humor.
The Toby Fox / Undertale version outperformed the original music stan posts by a massive margin, hitting 700,000 views compared to the Doja Cat post's 200,000.
People who encountered the meme without context often thought they were having a stroke or that their feed was broken.
The template is flexible enough that the only word users commonly change (besides the names) is the industry descriptor before "streaming," swapping "physical" for "digital gaming" or similar terms.