Aang Sees Past Avatars

Submission 4,514

Part of a series on Avatar: The Last Airbender / The Legend of Korra. [View Related Entries]

About

Aang Sees Past Avatars refers to an object labeling meme featuring a still from Avatar: The Last Airbender. The still shows the protagonist Aang seeing a vision of all his past incarnations or Avatars lined up, with Avatar Roku standing closest and turning to face him as his eyes glow. The meme is used to joke about being involved in long and often trivial traditions. The meme format first emerged in 2015.

Origin

In season 2 episode 1 of the Nickelodeon TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender, the protagonist Aang has a vision where he sees and speaks to all the past versions of himself.^[1]

On January 15th, 2015, now-deleted Twitter^[2] user @YahBoyAang posted the earliest known meme using a still from the scene, in a tweet where they wrote, "when you realize you're the last nigga in the blunt rotation." The tweet gathered at least 2,000 likes and 1,000 retweets (seen below). On September 20th, 2018, Redditor /u/Realicedteaco posted the earliest known version of the meme to use object labeling to the subreddit /r/MemeEconomy,^[3] gathering over 1,000 upvotes in over four years (seen below, right).

Spread

On February 23rd, 2019, Redditor DankPinnaple posted a version of the meme to /r/MemeEconomy^[4] and gathered over 13,000 upvotes in nearly three years (seen below, left). On February 24th, 2019, Redditor platinumpink4 posted a version of the meme to /r/me_irl,^[5] gathering over 38,000 upvotes in nearly three years (seen below, right).

On February 10th, 2020, a version of the meme that had text reading "Me sneezing so loud a baby starts crying" on Aang and "Every male ancestor" on the past Avatars gathered over 48,000 upvotes on a now-deleted Reddit post to /r/memes.^[6]

On September 8th, 2020, Tumblr^[7] user @bertsmememarket posted a version of the meme that gathered an unknown number of notes (seen below, left). On September 28th, 2020, Tumblr^[8] page @dankmemeuniversity posted a version of the meme and gathered over 150,000 notes in over two years (seen below, right).