Amy Lu's View

“We were just two people being wrong. We don’t get to have a special name for that.”

–Chad

Chad explained to me that we were just wrong, not special, as I was wondering if we had recently experienced “The Mandela Effect” by misremembering that the movie “Avatar” was released in the mid-nineties. We didn’t simply get the release date wrong, but we subjected our friends who were part of the conversation to a whole little story about how the movie came out when we were young and living in Iowa and too cash-strapped to see a movie that we weren’t seriously interested in. We were justifying why we’ve never seen the movie–too poor when it first came out and then we just never got around to it, our story went. 

“The Mandela Effect” does indeed refer to a false memory, but it involves several people having a false memory of the same thing–not just two people. I only know that there is a name for this phenomenon because the hosts of our beloved podcast, “Too Beautiful Too Live,” have talked about it on several episodes. The name comes from the apparently common and shared false memory that Nelson Mandela died in the mid-eighties. 

Chad and I weren’t just mistaken about Avatar, we were convinced we were right and reacted with disbelief when our friend Polly Googled the movie release date and informed us it was 2009 (when we certainly could have easily afforded to go see it). “That can’t be!” we exclaimed. “That must have been a re-release of a director’s cut or something.”

We eventually simmered down and accepted the truth. It was a humbling and disconcerting experience for me. While the release date of Avatar doesn’t have great implications for my life, I can’t help but wonder what other facts and stories I’m convinced about that haven’t happened, or happened in substantially different ways than I remember. 

One trippy theory about The Mandela Effect is that it’s caused by the existence of parallel universes–that the mass misremembered events DID actually happen–just in an alternate reality. Maybe, but that still doesn’t explain why some people remember the other reality. Well, maybe the theory does get into that, but I didn’t want to do that much Googling. And while I do enjoy pondering alternate realities, one where “Avatar” came out in the mid-90’s probably isn’t that different than this one, at least not for Chad and I. 

I did do enough Googling to learn about the really cool word “confabulation,” which means “false memories a person spontaneously generates, often to compensate for holes in a person’s memory” (https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/mandela-effect). We don’t confabulate intentionally or maliciously, it just happens. So while I probably shouldn’t say Chad and I experienced The Mandela Effect, I think I can accurately say Chad and I were confabulating about the movie Avatar. 

Or, maybe I can designate my own effect! From now on, when Chamy misremembers something together (which is pretty special in its own way), it will be known as “The Avatar Effect.” (Please note–this should NOT be confused with “An ‘Avatar’ Mandela Effect,” which is apparently a thing where people misremember a scene from the movie about the characters having “hair sex” https://wegotthiscovered.com/movies/a-curious-avatar-mandela-effect-questions-the-existence-of-navi-hair-sex/. Don’t ask me to explain, I still haven’t seen the movie).