Burst Into Treats
Part of a series on Greentext Stories. [View Related Entries]
About
Burst Into Treats is a bait-and-switch copypasta commonly used on 4chan imageboards to conclude a seemingly believable greentext story about a personal experience involving embarrassing or emotionally moving moments. Similar to Spaghetti Stories and Fucking Gamestop, the readers only become aware of the anticlimactic joke toward the end of each story.
Origin
On June 22nd, 2010, a greentext story thread titled "Greentext When You Felt Like a Dick"[1] was posted on 4chan's /r9k/ board, a miscellaneous board based on a bot made for the webcomic xkcd's IRC channel. One user replied to the thread with a story about a fight with his or her mother on the graduation day.
It is likely that the original poster meant to type “burst into tears,” but seemed to never reappear in the thread. Within five minutes of that post, other users in the thread called attention to the typo and incorporated the line into their own stories.
Spread
Three days later, an AskReddit[2] thread appeared asking for stories about causing someone to burst into treats. It has also been used in Yahoo! Answers[8] questions, paired with references to other greentext tropes, like spaghetti stories and penis inspection day.
The phrase has since spread to other 4chan boards, including /v/ (video games)[4], /b/ (random)[5] and /tv/ (television)[6], where the joke is typically played out in the form of green text stories[7], as well as on Tumblr[9], where there are cartoons and illustrations based on the original story.
Notable Examples
Search Interest
Search for "burst in treats" began in July 2010 with search peaks in November 2010 and April 2011 before reaching an all time high in October 2011.
External References
[1] Chanarchive – Greentext When You Felt Like A Dick
[2] Reddit – Reddit: Tell us a story about a time when you made someone burst into treats.
[4] chanarchive – Sleepover Stories January 3rd, 2011
[5] chanarchive – tell me something embarassing from your life /b/ January 18th, 2011
[6] chanarchive – Knock Knock / "Trick or Treat!" – October 30th, 2011
[7] chanarchive – ITT: Post your favorite recipes for anything: I'm trying to compile a /ck/ cookbook! August 22nd, 2010
[8] Yahoo! Answers – Girlfriend embarrassed me in front of freinds?
[9] Tumblr – Burst Into Treats
Top Comments
TheStudio
Dec 04, 2011 at 02:36PM EST
Philip J. Fry
Dec 04, 2011 at 04:14PM EST