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In October 2015, multiple content-scraping, clickbait web sites published a tale of wedding revenge involving a purportedly devoted step-dad, his ungrateful common-law wife and step-daughter, and a lauded but deadbeat biological father: The tale appeared on sites such as Tickld and Hrtwarming (Step-Dad Pulls Out Of Funding Daughter's Wedding at Last Minute. But His Reasoning Is Heartbreaking), the Conservative Post (Step Dad REFUSES to Pay For His Daughter’s Wedding Because This INCREDIBLE THING HAPPENED), and Top Right News (Step Dad Stops Paying for His Daughter’s Wedding at The Last Minute, His Reason Broke My Heart) at roughly the same time. Nearly all the sites opted to present the story in an image-based format, forcing readers who wished to share it to drive traffic to those sites rather than simply copying the text. All versions were near-verbatim recitations the same (too-good-to-be-true) anecdote. In it, a long-suffering step-dad was fed up with his freeloading live-in girlfriend (and the step-child for whom he's footed the bill for years) and was subjected to implausibly exploitative treatment for years at the hands of the mother and daughter — who, in his words, treated him like an ATM. After funding college for his girlfriend's daughter, he was then conscripted into financing a $40,000 wedding for her; and (in keeping with their comically boorish demeanor) she and her mother sent announcements to his friends and family instead of invitations, cutting them from the guest list. Incensed, he waited until a family gathering weeks prior to the wedding to make a toast, theatrically denouncing his mooching partner and her progeny in front of gathered guests. Afterwards, the man claimed he left his jobless girlfriend penniless (by draining their joint account) and canceled payments to all wedding vendors, essentially calling off his daughter's wedding. The story was certainly very pat, leaning heavily on deeply entrenched stereotypes of shiftless women and the meal-ticket men they routinely drain dry. Every character in it occupied a single dimension, either a long-suffering man-wallet or a callous woman with dollar signs in her eyes. Further implicit was the insinuation that the gold-digging step-daughter maintained no interest in her once-upcoming wedding other than the lavish event, as step-dad's last-minute funding withdrawal left no outcome in which the young bride availed herself of alternatives such as opting to say her vows in a county courthouse. Another unpleasant subtext involved the stepfather's heartbreaking motivation for breaking up with his family in front of an assembled crowd. Whether or not the narrative represented events that once occurred (or was simply the product of an active, misogynist imagination), the girl's major sin involved mending fences with her unreliable biological father in the weeks before her big day. While the writer took pains to paint the bride and her mother as greedy and selfish, he similarly admitted that his step-daughter's reconciliation with her biological dad was unacceptable to him. Through that lens, it seemed clear the writer (and not his erstwhile family) viewed their established relationship as purely transactional; after he implicitly bought and paid for them, they betrayed that unstated contract by failing to abide his every wish. As to whether a 3 November 2015 wedding was canceled as related in the narrative, that claim was provably false. The story was lifted in its entirety from a 3 June 2013 post to Reddit's r/offmychest titled My step-daughter wants her Real Dad to give her away, but it was subsequently reposted in subreddits devoted to misogyny and revenge tales. In the original version the wedding was scheduled for 3 August 2013 (not 3 November 2015), and it appeared the dates were revised to make the tale sound new. The user who claimed credit for originating it racked up a grand total of only four posts and was not an established Reddit user. That user returned to update the original post twice, but the story and its subsequent repetitions were still based on a single, unverified Reddit thread from 2013 (which perhaps would have more aptly been posted to this subreddit). While the narrative certainly resonated with readers, there's no evidence it occurred outside the imagination of the individual who wrote it.
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