bohemian rhapsody twitter

Queen Official / YouTube

This long-con ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Twitter scheme just won the internet

Almost four months in the making.

Photo of Stacey Ritzen 

Stacey Ritzen

Internet Culture

Posted on Aug 25, 2018   Updated on May 21, 2021, 7:57 am CDT

The already highly anticipated upcoming film Bohemian Rhapsody about the life of Freddy Mercury starring Rami Malek may have just gotten an added viral boost in the strangest of places.

First off, it goes without saying that Twitter gets a bad rap a lot of the time, and rightly so. There are literal Nazis running rampant. Russian bots, trolls, misogynists, and heck, even our own president uses the platform to bully and incite potentially harmful international relations and the website won’t do a damn thing about it.

But sometimes, Twitter can be used for pure, unadulterated good. This is one of those instances.

On May 7, 2018, user @CostcoRiceBag (Hadie Mart) tweeted completely innocuously, “Blows my mind that school used to go into JUNE and somehow I tolorated it [sic].”

Just a student making an observational remark. Nothing to see here, right?

Well fast forward to Aug. 23, and that same user tweeted the following:

The next handful of her tweets read as follows:

In case you weren’t keeping track, the first word of each of those tweets read: “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?”—as in, the first lyric to Queen’s iconic hit song, “Bohemian Rhapsody.” For four months, starting with the “blows my mind” tweet, @CostcoRiceBag had been slowly, painstakingly tweeting the words to the song backward.

To fully appreciate how great of an endeavor this was, know that there are a whopping 374 words in the nearly six-minute song.

Suffice to say, her persistence paid off, because in the two days since her big reveal, her final tweet in the scheme has gone mega-viral—liked more than 300,000 times and retweeted more than 136,000. Just as it should be.

Here are just a handful of the reactions of those in awe of the feat:

https://twitter.com/MildlyAmused/status/1033098058899316737

This isn’t the first time someone has pulled a long con joke on Twitter, but it certainly is the most impressive. Kudos all around.

Share this article
*First Published: Aug 25, 2018, 10:42 am CDT

Stacey Ritzen

Stacey Ritzen is a reporter and editor based in West Philadelphia with over 10 years' experience covering pop culture, web culture, entertainment, and news. You can follow her on Twitter @staceyritzen.

Stacey Ritzen