Many of us have wished for the death of Scrappy-Doo—an obnoxious, unfortunate add to the classic Scooby-Doo line of cartoons—many times. It’s hard to decides what was worse: His motto of “Puppy power”? His tendency to put up his dukes? Or the way he constantly messed up the plans of “Unca Scoob” and his pals as they tried to catch various mask-wearing evildoers?
Whatever it was, more recent Scooby-Doo creative forces appear to understand that Scooby’s little nephew is completely terrible. Scrappy is a throwaway in-joke in the excellent Mystery Incorporated! reboot, and (spoiler for 16-year-old movie) turns out to be the villain in the live action Scooby-Doo film.
So while the meme “Scrappy Doo has been found dead in Miami,” may appear to be wishful thinking, this unexpected plot twist has to stem from somewhere. New York magazine’s Select/All reports that there are thousands of tweets related to the heinous one’s demise in the Sunshine State; just search for “Scrappy-Doo dead Miami” in Twitter and you’ll instantly wind up with a screen like this:
Turns out the birth of this death comes from a fairly likely source: fan fiction. Back in 2011, “author WakeGirl14 published “Darkly Dreaming Scooby,” mashing up Scooby-Doo, the crime-solving Great Dane, with Dexter Morgan, the crime-solving serial killer” from the Miami-set series Dexter. Three years later, a fan-fiction Twitter account tweeted out the story’s hypnotic first line:
and it quickly went viral. The rest is fan-fiction, Twitter, and Tumblr (where the line also landed) history.
It’s no “Call me Ishmael,” but as first lines go, it definitely has possibilities.