In The Way Guy

About

“In The Way” Guy is a nickname given to a man who accidentally photobombed a Redditor’s marriage proposal at Walt Disney World. After the poorly timed photograph was submitted to Reddit in July 2013, the nameless man instantly became a subject of photoshopped mockeries on the site.

Origin

On July 22nd, 2013, Redditor SpnkyHappy submitted an image titled “Tried to get a photo of our proposal…nailed it!” to /r/Pics.^[1] The image revealed a flustered-looking man running across the foreground while the original poster’s boyfriend, who was subsequently identified as Lanipator^[2] of Dragon Ball Z Abridged series, proposed to her in front of Cinderella’s Castle at Walt Disney World. Despite the moderators flagging the post for a clichéd or unoriginal post title, it gained more than 32,700 upvotes, 2,400 points overall and 1,500 comments within 16 hours.

Spread

Within hours of submission, Redditor flipflipflipflipflop provided a template image^[3] of the trespassing man and many others followed suit with photoshopped variations in the thread, as well as on Imgur.^[17] Four hours after its submission, the original photo was cross-posted on /r/PhotoshopBattles^[4], where it gained more than 5,100 upvotes, 2,200 points and 320 comments within 12 hours. The top voted comment, depicting the man running across Alfred Eisenstaedt’s 1945 photograph V-J Day in Times Square^[5] (shown below), was later re-submitted to /r/Funny,^[6] accruing more than 40,000 upvotes, 2,200 points overall and 1,000 comments within eight hours. In the comments of this post, the subreddit /r/InTheWay^[9] was created to keep track of the growing collection, gaining more than 220 subscriptions within hours of launch.

Two hours later, Redditor oscc submitted another collection of photoshopped variations to /r/Funny in a post titled “Introducing…In The Way Guy,”^[7] bringing in more than 16,000 upvotes, 1,500 points overall and 429 comments, as well as 15,000 views on Imgur,^[8] within four hours. That same day, additional compilations of the photoshopped images were shared on Buzzfeed^[10], The Daily Beast’s Storify page^[11], Philly.com^[12], Tastefully Offensive^[13], the Huffington Post^[14], HappyPlace^[15], Heavy^[16] and the Daily Dot.^[18]