What is Breeding Difficulty?

Breeding Difficulty is a joke stat from Toasteed's 'I Sold You To A Pet Store' quiz that rates participants on a one-to-five-star scale, which went viral as a Twitter hashtag in late January 2023.

Where did Breeding Difficulty come from?

It comes from a name-based quiz posted on toasteed.com in January 2023 that imagines the user as a pet and prints a cartoon stat sheet with a Breeding Difficulty rating.

What does Breeding Difficulty mean?

In the quiz, Breeding Difficulty is a made-up rating for how hard the user would be to breed as a pet, with five stars being the hardest; outside the quiz, it only meant whatever trending tag people saw on their feed.

How do you use Breeding Difficulty?

Users typically take the Toasteed quiz, screenshot the resulting stat card, and post it with the #BreedingDifficulty tag or a reaction joke, as @bluedragonjet did with the Pokémon punchline on January 24, 2023.

Is Breeding Difficulty still popular?

No, the hashtag peaked between January 24 and 26, 2023 and faded within days, though the Toasteed quiz page is still reachable.

Breeding Difficulty

2023catchphrasedead

Published November 5, 2026

Breeding Difficulty, also known as the 'I Sold You To A Pet Store' Toasteed Quiz, blew up on Twitter in late January 2023 after users typed their names into a joke generator that rated them as pets. The hashtag #BreedingDifficulty trended January 24 through 26 as thousands shared their fake pet stat sheets, with confused onlookers initially guessing it referred to competitive Pokémon mechanics.

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Overview

Participants punch a name into the Toasteed prompt, click 'Take the test,' and receive a mock pet dossier listing a favorite food, a personality type, a 'notes' blurb and a Breeding Difficulty rating from one to five stars1. Five stars means hardest to breed, a detail that set off most of the jokes once results hit Twitter2.

Screenshots of the stat cards drove the format. Users posted their own cards, dunked on friends who got low ratings, and riffed on the 'breeding difficulty' line as if their own pet-sheet was dating advice3. A second strain of posts came from people who had not taken the quiz and only saw the hashtag, assuming it was a serious term from Pokémon or livestock circles3.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Toasteed.com / Twitter (viral spread)

Creator

Toasteed

Date

2023

In January 2023, the generator site Toasteed published a quiz at toasteed.com titled 'I sold you to a pet store! How much did you sell for?'1. Entering a name produced a cartoon stat sheet styled like a Pokédex page, with the five-star Breeding Difficulty meter sitting next to the favorite-food and personality fields1.

The quiz itself did not credit an individual author beyond the Toasteed site, which hosts similar name-based generators4. The format became a meme once Twitter users began screencapping results and attaching the #BreedingDifficulty tag in the final week of January 20232.

How It Spread

Starting January 24, 2023, #BreedingDifficulty climbed Twitter's trending list as users swapped their Toasteed cards2. That same day, @bluedragonjet tweeted 'Me thinking breeding difficulty is about competitive pokemon,' a reaction image that passed 5,100 likes within two days and became one of the signature posts of the trend3.

On January 25, @IshenSpins joked about turning back time to stop the hashtag from going viral, picking up more than 880 likes in a day5. HITC published a short explainer the same day walking readers through what the tag actually meant and where to take the Toasteed quiz2. By January 26 the trend had cooled, though screenshots of five-star Breeding Difficulty ratings kept circulating as quote-tweets and reply bait4.

Timeline

2023-01

Toasteed publishes the 'I sold you to a pet store!' quiz on toasteed.com, including a five-star Breeding Difficulty meter in the generated stat sheet.

2023-01-24

#BreedingDifficulty begins trending on Twitter; @bluedragonjet posts the 'competitive pokemon' reaction image that would gather over 5,100 likes.

2023-01-25

@IshenSpins posts a meme about turning back time to halt the trend; HITC publishes an explainer article about the hashtag.

2023-01-26

The hashtag peaks and begins to fade, with Toasteed quiz screenshots lingering as reply content.