Bad Luck Brian

A teenage boy poses for his school portrait in a plaid shirt and a red sweater-vest, grinning with full braces and a haircut that is not helping. He looks deeply, eternally uncool. The format is a caption split across the top and bottom: he tries to do something normal and well-meaning, and it ends in disaster. "Takes driving test / gets first DUI." "Tries to break up a fight / gets arrested." Setup on top, catastrophe on the bottom, every time.

This was THE advice animal — the genre of colored-wheel-background macros that ran the early-2010s internet, where a single character embodies one trait and you just keep feeding it scenarios. Bad Luck Brian was the patron saint of things going wrong through no real fault of your own. For a couple of years he was everywhere: Reddit front page, your friend's Facebook wall, printed on actual T-shirts. The real guy, Kyle Craven, leaned in and did interviews about being him.

He's dead now, and honestly so is the whole advice-animal format. Impact font on a colored wheel reads as a fossil from 2012 — the moment memes moved to screenshots, reaction images, and whatever Twitter was doing, this entire style got left behind. You'll still see Brian in a "remember these?" nostalgia post. You will not see anyone make a new one with a straight face.