The phrase comes from Turkish everyday speech, where eating the quince is a humorous way to say someone has landed in serious trouble with no easy escape. Online, the clipped repetition turned the idiom into a reaction sound on TikTok, shared under its joined, unaccented spelling because that is how many users search for it. It spread through short fail and reaction edits rather than a single credited source, and it remains popular because the meaning is clear even from tone alone, making it reusable across languages for any hopeless situation.