One should never underestimate the power of an image. Most of us could probably name and even mentally picture some important and powerful pics throughout history. Setting those cases aside for a moment, the images here are a clear indicator that just a random picture can, in an instant, make you stop what you are doing and start wondering what the hell is going on.

Even if these weird pics lack context, they have enough contextual clues that the average armchair detective can start theory crafting. Soon enough, entire novels are written in the comments sections as people argue and debate the finer points of each image. How did this happen? Was it staged, and so on? 

Adding some context doesn’t necessarily help. For example, most online news will run stories with an image or two. Inevitably, people will overfocus on the images and ignore the main details of the event. Researchers believe that this at times even contributes to false memories, as people’s minds immediately interpret and remember the story one way while ignoring or even forgetting key parts of the narrative. 

Fortunately, these are lone images, which, hopefully, most of us won’t randomly attribute to a real-world event. Instead, they might be an offshoot of a particular trend that began around 2017. Depending on what sites you frequented at the time, you might remember the plethora of “screenshots without context” pages that were showing up, taking random scenes with subtitles and posting them without further explanation. 

While most were focused on a particular sort of fandom, the very first one to gain a significant amount of attention was an X (previously Twitter) page focused on titles and screenshots from the New York Times, presented entirely without context. Both absurdist and deadpan at the same time, other, similar, pages started to creep up, showcasing just how often funny things are when we take a step back and look at them independently.