The 'Heaven Stairway Incident' is a cornerstone of the Trollge subgenre, a darker evolution of the classic Trollface comics. It originated from the 'Cover Yourself in Oil' meme, which sarcastically suggested that because oil floats on water, one could fly in the rain by dousing themselves in it. This specific iteration, dated May 2021 in New York City, transforms the lighthearted physics joke into a surreal horror story where the Trollface character ascends into the sky, leading to a catastrophic and ominous event. Since its explosion on platforms like Reddit and TikTok, it has come to represent the internet's fascination with 'liminal space' horror and the subversion of early 2010s meme culture into something distinctly uncanny and existential.