Talkative Tuesday 🤓 ➡️ ~ The Mandela Effect

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but it’s not “Looney Toons.” It’s Looney Tunes! I swear I almost fell out of my chair when I learned that this week. What started as a casual scroll through TikTok ended with me spiraling through conspiracy threads and questioning every childhood memory I’ve ever had. Welcome to today's discussion, the Mandela Effect.

If you’ve never heard of it, the Mandela Effect is this phenomenon where a bunch of people remember something a certain way, but turns out, it never actually happened like that. The name comes from how so many people remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the '80s. Except… he didn’t. He was released and went on to become president of South Africa. Yet somehow, thousands of people across the world remember the funeral, the news reports, the whole thing. That's where things start to get weird.

Some examples hit harder than others. People remember the Monopoly Man having a monocle. He doesn’t. People swear Pikachu used to have a black-tipped tail. Nope. The Fruit of the Loom logo? You probably remember a cornucopia behind the fruit. There never was one. And don’t even get me started on “Mirror, mirror on the wall”—the actual line is “Magic mirror on the wall.” Try rewatching Snow White, you’ll feel like reality glitched.

Now here’s where things really spiral: what if we’re not just misremembering, but remembering something from a different version of reality? Quantum theory says that every decision, every possibility, splits reality into multiple versions. So every time you chose one path, the other version of you went down the other one. What if those versions overlap sometimes? What if our memories are actually echoing from a neighboring universe?

And just like that, I started thinking about Alien X from Ben 10. Remember when he literally had to recreate the entire universe? Well, in the process, he made it almost exactly the same… but a few tiny things were off. Nothing major. Just small things, details that wouldn’t matter to most people. But they would feel strange to the ones who remember how it was before. What if that’s what we’re experiencing now? The Berenstein Bears didn’t change, we just slipped into the post-reset timeline, and our minds are glitching from the version we originally came from.

Maybe the Mandela Effect isn’t proof that we’re forgetful. Maybe it’s proof that we’re remembering too much. Traces of the universe we left behind, slipping through the cracks of the one we’re in now.