Arrogant John Walker

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Part of a series on The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. [View Related Entries]

About

Arrogant John Walker refers to an image of John Walker (played by Wyatt Russell) wearing Captain America's suit and smiling arrogantly, taken from episode two of the Marvel mini-series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Shortly after airing in March 2021, Twitter and Tumblr users began making jokes portraying the character as a "typical arrogant white guy."

Origin

On March 26th, 2021, the second episode of the Disney+ mini-series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier premiered on the platform. In the episode, John Walker takes over for the now deceased Captain America. As he first appears in the suit, he strikes an arrogant smile and posture, as if completely prepared to take on the role of Captain America. Further, the character is portrayed as fairly arrogant throughout the series.

The day the episode was released, Twitter users began criticizing the character. For example, on that day, Twitter^[1] user @agonicks posted a screenshot from the Harry Potter series of the titular character saying, "How dare you stand where he stood?" criticizing Walker as a replacement for Captain America, garnering over 1,300 likes and 200 retweets in six days (shown below, left). On the same day, Polygon^[4] posted an article describing how Walker becomes a villain in the comics including an image of Walker from the series looking arrogant (shown below, right).

On March 28th, Tumblr^[5] user ken0bes posted an image of a fish punching the ground from SpongeBob Squarepants photoshopped to say, "I never wanted to punch someone so bad in my entire life, never I swear," followed by the same image of Walker used in the Polygon article, garnering over 530 notes in four days (shown below). This is the earliest known use of the image as a meme.

Spread

On March 29th, 2021 Twitter^[3] user @UpToTASK posted the image, writing, "This guy is the @MichaelRapaport of the MCU" (shown below), garnering over 260 likes in three days and inspiring a string of tweets^[6]^[7] in which users upload the image and attribute various arrogant text to it (examples shown below, left and right).

On the same date, Tumblr^[2] user cryoverkiltmilk then posted the same image of Walker under text imagining how the casting call for the role might have gone, garnering over 250 notes in four days (shown below).