There's little rhyme or reason to what takes off on Reddit and what languishes in obscurity. ​Over the past three months the confluence of a years-old meme, a viral vine, a somewhat failed political movement, and a Dr. Dre track have resulted in a 145k-strong community. Welcome to the story of r/unexpectedthuglife.

You might recognize the title of the above thread as a reference to "I didn't choose the thug life, the thug life chose me," a quote attributed to the late Tupac Shakur, as well as a meme dating back to 2011. In its memetic form, the quote is usually paired with suburban, culturally tone-deaf looking kids. The popularity of these images initially peaked (based on Google search interest) in September of 2012 and has been on the decline since.

As is often the case on Reddit, ideas for new subreddits happen in the comments section: A user suggests that a given topic or style of content merits its own segregated community, and another user sees fit to create it. In this case, the heavily-upvoted r/videos post "You didn't choose the Thug Life" was linking to the video below, published October 3rd of last year:

The footage of this young boy saying, "I can't tie my shoes but I can fuck your bitch" originally comes from a Vine published about nine months earlier. It's unclear if this channel was the first to end the footage with a freeze frame, the "Thug Life" image and the intro to "Nuthin' But A 'G' Thang," but the combination became a tried and true method for repackaging a certain breed of video.

Iterations on the "Thug Life" outro do predate r/unexpectedthuglife, but not by much, as this video from June 2014 proves. But once these elements entered into Reddit's view, the community began refining them.

Instead of laughing at the expense of rude preteens, Redditors widened the scope of the source footage, focusing on challenges to authority, candid moments of brutal honesty, and of course, thugish or pseudo-thugish behavior. The tracklist also expanded to include a larger swath of gangsta rap and the ending freeze frame often faded comedically into black and white.

The original 2011 meme grew from specific to general, from still image to video, and the popularity of the subreddit increased swiftly after it ranked #14 on the r/AskReddit thread "What are the best subreddits that you discovered in 2014?". But the irony of pairing a Tupac quote with a song he didn't write is only trumped by the continued misunderstanding of what Thug Life is supposed to mean.

The popular understanding of THUG LIFE as an acronym is "The Hate You (u) Give Little Infants Fucks Everyone." It's not intended to praise thugish behavior or encourage crime — it's a struggle narrative. In the video above, Tupac explains, "When I'm saying 'thug' I mean not criminals… I mean the underdog. The person that has nothing and succeeds — he's a thug."

With this knowledge, these videos fall somewhere between ignorant and insulting.

Even so, are some of them funny? Yes. The exaggeration of small social trespasses is the same stuff that makes Seinfeld or any other comedy of manners amusing. How quickly r/unexpectedthuglife broke 100k subscribers says a great deal about the state of Reddit. Is this another example of a largely privileged (and largely white) community misappropriating culture? Absolutely.

Maybe there's a line to be drawn between the people contributing to this meme and the exact type of insensitive kids it started out lampooning.