Bone Hurting Juice is an image macro series and photoshop meme centered around a fictitious type of juice that causes aching sensations in the drinker’s bones when consumed, often resulting in the cry “oww oof my bones.” The meme spawned a genre of memes based on alternative interpretation of meme formats, with notable communities collecting such memes established on Facebook and Reddit.
Origin
On July 8th, 2016, the Fun Silly Drawings for Fun Silly People Facebook[3] page posted a Sweet Jesus, Pooh! comic in which Pooh says “owww my bones hurt a lot oww oof my booones” after drinking “bone hurting juice” (shown below).
Spread
On December 18th, 2016, a thread about bone hurting juice was started on the image board 420Chan[1] (shown below). On August 11th, 2016, the Bone Hurting Juice Facebook[5] page was launched.
On February 19th, 2017, Urban Dictionary[2] user WeeabooLord submitted an entry for “bone hurting juice,” defining it as “Juice that hurts your bones” (shown below, left). On April 7th, 2017, the /r/bonehurtingjuice[4] subreddit was launched for various anti-meme submissions. On April 14th, Redditor voomroom submitted a
/r/bonehurtingjuice Subreddit Drama / Operation Chungus
On November 15th, 2019, moderator team of 600,000 subscriber strong /r/bonehurtingjuice[7] subreddit restricted the community to only allow posts from moderators and approved posters.[8] While no official reason for the action was provided at that time, users on /r/bonehurtingjuice and related subreddits speculated that the moderation team was dissatisfied with the decreasing quality of posts in the community and “bone hurting juice” meme format generally becoming obsolete and made a decision to “kill” the sub.[9][10] In the following days, /r/bonehurtingjuice moderation team and a number of approved users from /r/bonehurtingjuice Discord uploaded shitposts and ironic memes not in vein with the the usual content on the sub.[11][12] Additionally, the CSS of the subreddit was altered to a mess of random images.
On November 16th, 2019, refuge /r/boneachingjuice subreddit was created by doofusllama, gaining over 21,900 members in three days.[13] Additionally, more subreddits such as /r/BoneHurtJuice, /r/subkillingjuice, /r/bonehurting_juice were created, with the smaller subreddits later mergning with /r/boneachingjuice. In that period, /r/boneachingjuice moderator TerrryTerr was removed from the moderation team due to using racial and homophobic slurs on the /r/boneachingjuice Discord.[14][15] On November 17th, a post about the /r/bonehurtingjuice restriction was created in /r/SubredditDrama, gaining over 2,500 upvotes in three days.[20]
On November 18th, 2019, /r/bonehurtingjuice moderation team lifted the previously imposed restrictions. On the same day, a now-deleted moderator account posted an explanation post about the recent events,[16] claiming that Operation Chungus was an attempt to destroy the sub and writing that Redditor Kirbizia, the original founder of /r/bonehurtingjuice who was friends with several of its current moderators, insisted that the sub would be reopened.[17] In the following hours, the explanation was several times reposted to /r/copypasta.[18][19]
Various Examples
