Is This a Pigeon?

In the 1991 anime The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird, an android unfamiliar with Earth points at a butterfly and asks, "Is this a pigeon?" Twenty years later, the internet discovered this scene and realized it was the perfect template for willful misidentification.

The format is beautifully flexible: label the man, label the butterfly, label his oblivious question, and you've captured any moment of spectacular confusion. Boomers calling everything a millennial. Corporations calling workers "family." Any person confidently mislabeling anything. The template does the heavy lifting.

What started as a 2011 Tumblr discovery exploded in 2018 when the format went mainstream. Everyone had something they'd seen catastrophically misidentified, and finally they had the perfect image to express it.

Nearly fifteen years after its rediscovery, the format persists. As long as people keep confusing things for other things—and they will, forever—Is This a Pigeon will be there to document it. The butterfly remains patient.