Sakurafish / Every Day Until You Like It

About

Sakurafish is a daily dose type image mainly posted on 4chan’s /a/ (anime & manga) and /jp/ (otaku culture) boards. The image shows the character Sakura, one of the main female heroines in the Fate/Stay Night visual novel, forcefully biting into a fish. The idea of the image is to post them on such a regular basis that even those that initially hate it will eventually grow used to it and like it. Due to this threads featuring sakurafish are commonly accompied with the text “I’m going to post this every day until you like it.” Although initially seen as widespread trolling in 2007 and 2008, through 2009 and later opinions about sakurafish became more positive, resulting in the image seeing often usage in photoshops.

Origin

Sakura Matō (shown below, left) is one of the three main heroines in Fate/Stay Night visual novel^[1] developed by Type-Moon, although she only has a more significant role in one of the three possible routes. Fate/Stay Night rapidly became one of the most popular visual novels in history after its release on January 30th, 2004, resulting in a large fan following of the series which also spread to the western web. The earliest version of the image used in sakurafist posts can be traced back to a Sakura collection post^[3] on the South Korean search portal Naver^[5] posted on October 6th, 2006 (shown below, right). The watermark on the image in the post traces the creator back to Naver blogger yoow889.^[4]

The first archived instance of a sakurafish thread dates back to February 7th, 2008, on the online archive, Foolz.^[2] Sakurafish threads were already active on 4chan as early as 2007 and possibly 2006, but have been lost as Foolz does not trace back that far.

Spread

Over the course of 2008, the catchphrase “I’m going to post this every day until you like it” made a common appearance as a style of troll posting. Even though sakurafish threads were still the most common amongst the posts, other recurring topics often involved disturibing or aggrevating content such as gore or the King of Get.