We Talked To The Guy Who Created /r/Bananimals

In /r/bananimals, the rules are simple: No monkey business. It's tempting to potassium off as a joke, but these fruitful creatures are no gag. Post your best Photoshop-jobs of banana-hybrid animals, and reap the karma harvest.

Four years ago, Reddit user battletooth—whose real name is Eric Gueder—voiced a silly idea in the /r/hybridanimals subreddit: Why not bananas? He started /r/bananimals, made a few weird mashups, had a laugh, and then the subreddit fell into disuse for years as people moved on.

So what's an old, dead subreddit doing on the front page and trending on Reddit? I messaged the bananaman who first made the sub four years ago to find out.

Gueder is 28, lives in Nevada, and said that it took a while for him to realize where all of this new attention was coming from. He was browsing /r/all and noticed a bananimal.

"It reminded me of my own sub until I realized it was in my sub," Gueder told me via email. "I thought, 'Oh, here is the yearly submission to this subreddit again,' until I noticed the post had something like 40 karma. That's not a lot, but for a sub that no one knows about, I found it extremely odd."

Gueder posted a thread in the sub titled, "WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE AND HOW DID YOU FIND MY BANANIMALS?" and soon got his answer. The sub's newfound popularity is thanks to a mention on the June 23 episode of the Good Mythical Morning web series, where the hosts play a game to guess whether subreddits are real. When Hank and John Green described it, they say it had "300-plus subscribers." A day later, it's over 1,600 strong.

"My initial reaction was being surprised, as you can imagine," he said. "It's always cool when something you do gets brought up by people you watch!"

Gueder isn't sure where the GMM guys found the bananimals sub in the first place, but wondered if a comment he made less than a month ago in /r/overwatch linking to bananimals tipped them off.

In the last three days, he's added a few moderators to maintain the subreddit, and watched as people post their own yellow, freakish creations. Highlights include the Sharknana, and Banulture, but the original Banotter is Gueder's favorite.

"I love otters, but I love that the banana peel is also the otter's body," he said. "It is a work a art."