# Sloths Sloths, the slow tree-dwelling mammals of Central and South America, became an unlikely internet fixation starting around 2010, when a viral video of one crawling across a Costa Rican road kicked off a wave of blogs, image macros and remix videos. The trend spawned single-topic Tumblrs, advice-animal formats like Socially Lazy Sloth, and the Photoshopped Astronaut Sloth prank that took over Reddit and Tumblr in 2012. ## Origin Sloth fandom online predates the meme wave by nearly a decade. A parody site from October 2002 rewrote the copypasta-heavy Ninja fansite Real Ultimate Power to insist that sloths, not ninjas, flip out and kill people[5]. A Tripod "Unofficial Sloth Fanclub" followed in January 2005[6], and in May 2006 a Last.fm group called the Sloth Appreciation Society started tracking what fans of the animal listen to[7]. The viral turning point came on April 26, 2010, when YouTuber Mermaid5651 posted footage of a sloth inching across a road in Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica before a motorcyclist stopped, picked it up and carried it to the other side[8]. On May 14, 2011, YouTuber Chema Leon recut the clip against R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly" and titled it "Sloth's Perspective," a version reuploaded days later by timah99 that passed 7 million views by March 2013[4]. - **Platform:** YouTube / Tumblr (viral spread) - **Creator:** Unknown - **Date:** 2010 ## Overview The sloth meme wave is less one image than a small ecosystem: single-topic blogs, YouTube clips, and a handful of advice-animal templates all built around the same slow, grinning mammal. The animal's reputation for laziness drives most of the humor, even though field research says sloths are more active than the stereotype suggests[1]. Blogs like omgsloths mixed sloth trivia with photos and half-affectionate insults about their intelligence[2]. Two image-macro formats did most of the heavy lifting. Socially Lazy Sloth pairs a cropped sloth head on a blue and green advice-animal background with captions about ducking plans and avoiding people[3]. Astronaut Sloth, a Photoshop by digital artist Pedro Dionísio, became a prank format on Tumblr and Reddit where people quietly swapped a family photo or desktop wallpaper for the space-suited sloth and waited for someone to notice[4]. The video side is smaller but stickier: a single clip of a sloth being helped across a road in Costa Rica became the definitive sloth video after a music remix pushed it past 7 million views[4]. ## How It Spread Tumblr did most of the aggregation work. The single-topic blog Fuck Yeah Socially Lazy Sloth launched on August 21, 2010, collecting image macros of a sloth's head on a blue and green split background with captions about social avoidance[3]. A matching Facebook page went up two weeks later, and by 2013 the Socially Lazy Sloth Memegenerator page held more than a thousand submissions[4]. Advice-animal riffs kept multiplying. Rape Sloth, an intentionally uncomfortable macro built from a 2010 Pirelli Calendar photo of a sloth appearing to whisper in a woman's ear, was first threaded on BodyBuilding.com forums by user VitaCrave on February 22, 2012, and later grew a Quickmeme page with hundreds of entries[4]. In January 2012, Pedro Dionísio's Astronaut Sloth composite began circulating; Tumblr user alpacalypse posted on October 29, 2012, about swapping every wallpaper on her father's computer for the image, and a Redditor did the same to a boss's family photos days later[4]. By March 2013, sloth had cracked 330,000 YouTube results and 34,000 tweets, with dozens of Tumblr fan blogs including Sloth Love, The Sloth Sabbath, Slothville and Your Daily Baby Sloth all running since 2010 or later[4]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Sloths? Sloths is a cluster of internet content built around the tree-dwelling South American mammal, including viral videos, single-topic Tumblrs, and advice-animal image macros like Socially Lazy Sloth and Astronaut Sloth[4]. ### Where did Sloths come from? Sloth fandom online goes back to a 2002 Real Ultimate Power parody, but the meme wave took off after YouTuber Mermaid5651 posted a 2010 clip of a sloth crossing a road in Costa Rica[8]. ### What does Sloths mean? The joke leans on the animal's stereotyped laziness and slow movement, even though research says sloths are more active than assumed[1]; captions usually project human procrastination or social avoidance onto the animal[3]. ### How do you use Sloths? Common formats include Socially Lazy Sloth macros on a blue and green background about ducking plans[3], and the Astronaut Sloth prank of swapping someone's wallpaper or framed photo for Pedro Dionísio's Photoshop[4]. ### Is Sloths still popular? The peak of sloth mania was 2010-2013, when dozens of Tumblr blogs and Facebook pages tracked the animal[4]; the videos and macros are still passed around but the trend is best treated as a classic of that era. ## References 1. [https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7396356.stm]() 2. [https://web.archive.org/web/20120507062506/https://omgsloths.tumblr.com/]() 3. [https://web.archive.org/web/20110515122510/http://fuckyeahsociallylazysloth.tumblr.com/]() 4. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sloths]() 5. [https://web.archive.org/web/20050911143100/https://www.vynsane.com/rup.html]() 6. [https://web.archive.org/web/20140810174933/http://s0lamentenoche.tripod.com/slothfanclub.html]() 7. [https://web.archive.org/web/20101213041140/https://www.last.fm/group/Sloth+Appreciation+Society]() 8. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES32UFlPOUA]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/sloths Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library