In ancient times Bros Iced Bros. They just did. And you know what they say: “What goes around comes around.” And it just might be time for some serious coming.
… around… of… Icing… each other… again… You get what I’m saying!!!
For the uninitiated, Icing someone is making them take a knee and chug a bottle of Smirnoff Ice when presented with one. If they happen to have one on their person they can present it, and the initial aggressor must chug both. The basic premise was that it was so sweet that if you got iced multiple times throughout the day you could feel sick just from that; no one really LIKED the drink; being “woke” wasn’t really a thing yet so it being a “girly” drink made it vaguely emasculating… So, it was just a prank, bro!
“Simple Rules:
You cannot refuse an Ice. If you refuse to drink the Ice you are instantly excommunicated and shunned, and thus can never Ice another bro or be iced.
If you are Iced by a fellow bro you can Ice block. When presented w/ an Ice, you pull out an Ice of your own and reverse the Ice on your bro. The ultimate Ice Insult.
-Teddy Broosevelt May 26, 2010“
These words were posted in the forums of BrosIcingBros.com and then plastered at the top of the website ultimately canonizing the basic rules, or “brotocol,” for the game. Fraternity members of the College of Charleston claim to have posted how to play to BroBible before the trend blew up and that their post was copied, stolen, and used as the basis for BrosIceingBros. We don’t know for sure if this is true but we DO know BrosIceingBros only existed for a few months in the spring and early summer of 2010 and that it was the ultimate hub for Icing content at the time.
The content was incredible. The editors claimed they had to wade through more than 100 submissions a day and only post the best user submissions. Sound like ANOTHER website with young adult users that had a function in 2010 where said users provided near endless namesake submissions that needed only filtering and publishing, and provided the main basis for community interaction, and let the higher-ups know what said audiences and by extension colleges were actually into, instead of assuming their writers know everything about college life across the country, that could also use a modern-day reboot? I digress…
The one-upmanship for the content caused some to either change the rules among their own group or to assume there were rules that didn’t necessarily exist such as MAKING someone have to Ice themselves either by having to touch the bottle themselves via hand shake; or pulling that classic porn trick of hiding it in the Pringles can and letting them reach inside to find NOT Pringles; or to come upon the Ice by opening the fridge to find nothing but a single Ice staring them in the face; or by hiding it in their backpack; or even hollowing out part of a birthday cake and sliding it in. It ramped up in complexity pretty fast.
However, as we can see from the “Simple Rules,” technically the game is brutally simple: if you want to be allowed to continue to play you must accept, kneel, and drink at any moment of presentation. It could be as simple as walking up to someone in the library while they are studying and placing it in front of them. If they don’t wanna lose the privilege to Ice someone else they gotta do it right then and there.
TFM started around the same time and in the beginning there was no shortage of icing content, especially in pulling TFM’s and having it posted on the Wall. Years later there were at LEAST two articles, now in the Archive of #ClassicTFM, that discuss Iceing and they say many of you guys are either doing it again or never stopped. Good for you!
But I think that back in the day it was an explosion of popularity that burned so big that it caused itself to burn out too quick.
It’s time to let Iceing be COOL again.
