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What do you think is the most popular Gif among British pop music fans? How long do you think you could keep the secret that the child you said was yours was really kidnapped? What do you know about the trans community in Rio de Janeiro?
If you’re confused, then you’re in the right place, because so is this lady.
Origins
This is Brazilian soap opera star Renata Sorrah. As an actress, she’s best known for her portrayal of Nazaré, the main antagonist of Senhora do Destino (Lady of Destiny), which ran on Brazilian television in the mid-2000s.
As a meme, she’s best known for exactly the same reason.
Over the course of the drama, Nazaré kidnaps a child, murders her husband, electrocutes another guy in a bathtub, and finds herself in increasingly complicated situations in order to survive. All of which led the character at one point to this scene.
In 2013, a UKMix.org user by the name of CrazyCrazy posted a Gif of her confounded expression to a thread called “The Gif Thread” which had the goal of compiling the site’s users favorite gifs in one place. The caption? “I’m sure there is better music to hear while you wait for Beywance…”
Reformatting as an image macro, and early spread
For a while, it was used only occasionally as a reaction image expressing confusion. At one point Renata’s Gif was featured on a Buzzfeed Brazil listicle, but in reality it was actually only one a few Nazaré memes.
Others included one about the struggles of adulting, and another simply about being fabulous. But it would have remained in relative obscurity, if not for 9Gag. In July of 2016, a Confused Lady post was posted which broke the gif down into 4 panels, added overlays of trigonometry to it, and captioned the whole thing “When a woman says she’s 29 weeks pregnant.”
This caused it to really take off in popularity, probably because it added a little more specificity to an image that before had been kind of generic.
With the math overlays, it still gets the same message across, but now there’s narrative to image macro. It gets funnier and funnier as you read from panel to panel because of the juxtaposition of doing complicated equations in your head with what’s often a pretty mundane problem presented in the caption.
Broader popularity
Confused Math Lady never quite became a titan of meme culture, but at its peak it was a household name just as widely known as, say, Elmo on Fire, Pepe Silvia, or Galaxy Brain. And unlike a lot of other memes which have a really bright moment and then fade away, the relevance of Confused Math Lady seems to be evergreen.
In May of 2023, it was reported by South American news outlets that at the age of 76, Renata Sorrah had come out as bisexual.
She pretty quickly denied this, saying that she only wanted to express solidarity with trans people during a live show in Rio, but by then it was too late. The LGBTQ community had already latched on.
While some users in LGBTQ community merely stanned Renata, or made Confused Math Lady jokes, others more familiar with Senhora do Destino resurfaced a scene where her character says, “Dykes…I can smell their lesbian scent from here.”
Overall, it seems like Renata is pretty amused by the whole thing. When she went out to a bar during the Curitiba Film Festival and all the young people there first recognized her not from her acting but from Confused Math Lady, she went straight to Instagram to take credit.
It’s natural to be surprised if you think you’re famous primarily for your decades of screen acting, only to find out that your real legacy might end up being internet jokes.
But in the end, nobody should be confused as to why this took off.
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