It was always obvious that Reddit would bring about the downfall of civilization. However, the method by which it did so…well, what can one say?

In short: Reddit gained sentience. And developed magical powers to boot.

The first murders occurred in the spring of 2022. A housewife from Hoboken suffered a heart attack after a meme she had posted received the Heartwarming Award. A computer programmer from Terre Haute was strangled to death with a gold necklace on the same evening when one of her comments was given the Gold Award. And an insurance salesman from Riverside was eaten alive by narwhals three days after his Reddit account was recognized with the Narwhal Seal of Approval.

These parallels, ominous as they are in hindsight, were hardly noticed by the public, and dismissed as mere coincidences by investigators. However, when a house in Chicago was found to be filled to the brim with snakes, the international press took notice, and a group of conspiracy theorists drew far-reaching conclusions from the fact that the inhabitants Reddit accounts had gotten eight “Snek” Awards during the previous month. Their findings were initially ridiculed, but as Redditors from all over the country continued to die under suspicious circumstances, even skeptics had to face the terrifying truth: Reddit was killing people.

The publics reaction to this revelation cannot be described in less than apocalypse-evoking terms. The realization that merely giving away a silly-looking emblem could seal the fate of a human being was greeted with abject horror by normal people and with enthusiasm by mentally unstable individuals. Coincidentally, members of the latter group were already highly likely to possess a Reddit account. The results were as bloody as they were predictable.

After shutting down the platform proved impossible, the government tried to limit the impact of the newly arisen terror by banning things that were depicted on Reddit awards. Goats were slaughtered, seals shot and chibi-like looking people were imprisoned in camps. This was futile however, for new Reddit awards, like the Masked Killer Award, the Maya Sacrifice Award and the Old Lady Award were created, seemingly overnight and without any input from a programmer.

The next stage of escalation was reached when, after a minister received a brutal beating from a group of old ladies, it was discovered that there were millions of profiles for individuals who had never been active on Reddit. When this information was leaked, all remnants of civic order broke down. The “normal” citizens, who until that point had mostly tried to sit out the crisis, formed militias and started lynching computers. Hundreds of masked killers and Maya priests appeared in the streets and fraternized with old ladies. The chibi-like looking people escaped from their camps and banded together in bloodthirsty gangs. The apocalypse had come.

Today a new award was announced. The Enola Gay Award looks like a little ball from which several mushroom-like structures emerge. Nobody knows what its effect could be.