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It’s pretty funny that someone this scary-looking took over an entire category of pop culture when she first came on the scene. Enrapture might be one word for it, obsession another, but the best way to describe the meme landscape of the early 2010s is that social media got overly attached.
It starts with Justin Bieber
Our story begins with Justin Bieber. In mid-2012, as part of the launch of a perfume line called “Girlfriend,” the singer instigated a sing-along contest in which many would create parody videos of his hit, “Boyfriend.”
The most memorable submission came on June 6, 2012 from a YouTuber named Laina Morris. Girlfriend begins with an instrumental intro, and so Laina had to do something. Her last-minute idea? Stare creepily into the camera, like this.
By the time she went to bed that night, it had 51 or 52 comments, which was weird, because she knew she didn’t have that many friends who would comment on something like that video. But by the time she woke up the next morning, it was much, much bigger.
In 24 hours, the video had over a million views.
Overly Attached Girlfriend’s spread
The following day, a redditor by the handle /u/yeahhtoast submitted a screenshot from the video, along with the caption “I sewed my name on your shirts, in case you forget that you’re taken” to /r/adviceanimals—christening the new meme: “Overly Attached Girlfriend.”
Advice animals was and still is a subreddit housing a wide range of image macro memes, but this one spread everywhere all at once. BuzzFeed, the Daily Dot, the Tosh.0 blog and many more were talking about it in the following days, and it even spawned a Tumblr blog that compiled the best hits.
On the 12th, following a series of events where users found her personal Facebook profile, Laina took credit on Twitter, and on the 18th followed up on the Bieber video with a “Call Me Maybe” parody. At the time that video was released, both of them were in the top 1 and 2 spots on YouTube’s homepage, which basically meant Laina was the hottest thing anywhere videos were shared on the internet.
Laina becomes a professional YouTuber
The timing of all of this could not have been better for Laina. She’d been taking a break from school where she was studying to become a teacher, but decided to drop out permanently following all of this success. She got professional talent management, which enabled her to create many more videos, some of which had big sponsors, including Kia and Autotrader.
Laina appeared alongside a lot of other memes in a Delta Airlines safety video, and in a live event in Singapore where she had a staring contest with Jessica Alba. She used her fame to raise money for charity. She got to go on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, the Nerdist Podcast, and even appeared in 2013’s YouTube rewind. She also collaborated with Bad Luck Brian, and as of today, she has around 1 and a quarter million subscribers on YouTube.
Mental health struggles, and slowdown
If you’re thinking to yourself that all of this sounds like a really fast and abrupt change for a 20-year-old college student, you’d be right.
Beginning in 2014, the stresses and pressures of her fame began to get to her, causing depression, shame, and guilt. By 2017, she’d been tapering off from the platform, posting less and less in order to take care of her mental health.
In other words, Laina herself was a little overly attached to her meme, and to her credit, realized that she needed to take a more moderate attitude toward it. However, taking a step back from the limelight did seem to slow down the rest of the world’s appetite for Overly Attached Girlfriend, but it never really went away.
In 2018, a pair of Reddit posts proposing a new “Overly Confident Ex-Girlfriend” went viral, with one netting 82,000 upvotes.
Unsurprisingly, this wasn’t the only time someone else tried to use the meme to karma-farm. Overly Attached Girlfriend spawned a number of spin-offs. Highlights include, Overly Attached Boyfriend, Misunderstood Girlfriend, and Underly Attached Girlfriend.
Laina still posts about all of this, but only on occasion.
In 2021, she sold an NFT of the screenshot for 200 Ethereum, worth, at the time, about $415,000. Maybe the most ironic thing about this story is that when Laina stopped pushing it as her day job, the rest of us kind of moved on.
In other words, the character may be overly attached, but the people of the internet…kind of aren’t.
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