Versus Pooping — Public bathroom with two toilets facing each other without any dividing stall

Versus Pooping

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Published October 17, 2026

Versus Pooping is an exploitable image format built on a photo of a bathroom with two toilets facing each other, topped with pictures of two rivals seemingly locked in a competitive bowel movement. First surfacing on Imgur in January 2016 as a 'Super Saiyan Pooping Contest' joke1, the layout turned into a Reddit meme template in spring 2020 after users paired it with Greta Thunberg and other famous faces2.

exploitable templates shock humor memes two panel memes subreddit origin memes delayed virality memes

Overview

Each Versus Pooping edit stacks two panels. The bottom panel is the fixed bathroom photo showing two toilets installed directly across from each other, with no stall divider between them. The top panel is the swappable half, where creators drop in two faces, characters, or logos staring one another down, implying the pair is grinding through a head-to-head session on the bowls below4.

The humor leans on strained or furious expressions in the top panel, which readers reinterpret as poop-face once they clock the toilets. Posters picked matchups that stretch the gag, from real figures like climate activist Greta Thunberg to video game villains like Senator Armstrong from Metal Gear Rising4. The format works as a reaction template too, since any existing standoff image can be slapped above the bathroom to recast a rivalry as a toilet duel.

Origin & Background

Platform
Imgur (source image) / Reddit (viral spread)
Date
2016

The source photograph of the back-to-back toilet setup first showed up on Imgur on January 12th, 2016, uploaded by an unnamed account that titled it 'Super Saiyan Pooping Contest'1. A second shot of a similar face-off bathroom appeared on Imgur on June 22nd, 2017 under the caption 'Uhhh… I guess everyone needs a pooping buddy?' and pulled in a few hundred views over four years5.

Neither of the original photographers is identified, and the KYM entry notes that the earliest bathroom images are 'somewhat obscured' in their provenance4. The pictures circulated as curiosities about weird plumbing until Reddit posters repurposed them into a two-panel template years later.

How It Spread

The template version with a character-swap top panel took off on Reddit in spring 2020. On April 26th, 2020, user SuperVermiceli posted an early example to r/me_irl using a different face-to-face toilet photo as the base, and the post picked up over 2,000 upvotes within six months3. Two weeks later, on May 9th, 2020, Redditor TheNeonJudgement shared a version in r/OliverMarkusMalloy that paired the bathroom with Greta Thunberg and the Trying to Hold a Fart Next to a Cute Girl in Class meme, earning around 360 upvotes2.

From there, edits using the same template proliferated with fictional matchups, including Senator Armstrong from Metal Gear Rising, which KYM lists among the format's recognized examples4. The joke travels well because the bathroom photo stays constant while the top panel can be anything, so each remix only has to supply a pair of combatants with angry or constipated faces.

Timeline

2016-01-12

An unknown Imgur user uploads the first known photo of the back-to-back toilets with the caption 'Super Saiyan Pooping Contest.'

2017-06-22

A second, slightly different face-off bathroom photo is posted anonymously to Imgur under a 'pooping buddy' caption.

2020-04-26

Redditor SuperVermiceli posts an early meme template version to r/me_irl, drawing over 2,000 upvotes.

2020-05-09

Redditor TheNeonJudgement posts a Greta Thunberg Versus Pooping edit to r/OliverMarkusMalloy, cementing the two-panel character-swap format.

Frequently Asked Questions