King of Sweden Yelling

Submission 7,961

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About

King of Sweden Yelling, also known as Swedish King at The Olympics, is an exploitable image macro featuring an image from the 2012 Olympics in which King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden is seen screaming towards the arena during a handball match, causing the elderly woman seated in front of him to cover her ears with obvious anger and his wife next to him to flinch away while applauding. It has been used sporadically as an image macro, object-labeling and Photoshop meme since 2013, with a new wave appearing in late June 2021.

Origin

The origin of the photo comes from the 2012 Summer Olympics, which were held in London. Handball teams from Sweden and Denmark advanced to play one another in the quarter-finals. During the tense match, the King of Sweden was photographed in distress multiple times before his country’s 24-22 win. The earliest known online publication of the photo (seen below) came in a Daily Mail^[1] article titled "A right royal din! King of Sweden almost deafens spectator as he roars his support for Olympic handball team" on August 10th, 2012.

The image took longer to appear in meme form, with the earliest known example (seen below) utilizing the template appearing on Reddit’s /r/funny^[2] in 2013. Uploaded by u/CapnFancyPants, it received only seven upvotes and two comments before being archived.

Spread

The image reappeared in online jokes and memes for eight years, though there wasn’t an official trend towards them until the influx of King of Sweden yelling memes in 2021. In 2019, this popular post on /r/photoshopbattles brought more attention to the meme and resulted in a number of edited images. The prompt by u/lizardpoop27 received over 20,800 upvotes and 318 comments.^[3] Redditor u/Maymayfish uploaded this image (seen below) to the thread and received over 1,100 upvotes.

2021 Resurgence

Redditor u/HiImErni uploaded the image (post seen below) as a template to /r/MemeEconomy^[4] on June 30th, 2021, where it received 10,000 upvotes and 115 comments within 24 hours.

Shortly after, the image began to trend as a meme once again. For example, this World of Warcraft take on the template (seen below) was posted to /r/wow^[5] 16 hours after the post in /r/MemeEconomy, receiving 268 upvotes and 63 comments within seven hours.