The rat was posted to r/cursedimages in August 2018 as “cursed_rat.” It is the oldest public post we found. It still does not tell us who took the photo.

By October, the message was on it. cattletorture posted a captioned version to Tumblr. Know Your Meme gives the credit to dawatercup. We do not have enough to choose between those two stories.

The video version came through @comfygang in 2019, then the post disappeared. One archive from 2021 credits @stjarnbrand and says @comfygang was an old name. Maybe. The original post is gone, so that part stays open.

That is what we know: photo, caption, edit. After that, people kept using the format to send things off.