Unfinished Horse Drawing / Flaming Horse Rating

Confirmed 132,198

Part of a series on Exploitables. [View Related Entries]

About

Unfinished Horse Drawing is an exploitable image macro of an illustration of a horse split into two halves, one detailed and the other crude. The image has been used to describe the feeling of being rushed through a task and to express the feeling that something's quality has diminished over time. In 2022, the meme made a comeback on Twitter in the form of the Flaming Horse Rating format in which people rated the quality of various sections of a TV or movie series in a similar style.

Origin

Precursor

On January 16th, 2017, Twitter^[2] user @raphaelb53 shared a similar horse picture. The post was captioned, "When ur writing an essay for a test and the teacher says u have 3 minutes left" (shown below).

Unfinished Horse Drawing Format

Artist Ali Bati drew the original image as part of an advertising campaign.^[7] They write, "I made this campaign and the illustrations for the communication of an art school but the one with the horse took on a life of its own. It became a meme and turned into one of the most popular images on the internet."

The earliest known usage of the image was published on the /r/funny subreddit on March 18th, 2018, by Redditor ^[1] marsel_zdr. They captioned the post, "When there is 5 minutes remaining on your test." The post received more than 3,000 points (96% upvoted) in less than two years (shown below).

Spread

Two days later, on March 20th, 2018, Redditor^[3] dhruveishp posted the picture with the caption "When there is 5 minutes left on the test." The post received more than 17,000 points (93% upvoted) and 150 comments in less than two years.

That day, Twitter^[4] user @mr_drinksonme shared the image with the same caption. The post received more than 155,000 likes and 87,000 retweets in less than two years (shown below, left).

Two days later, Twitter^[5] user @nijfranck tweeted the image with the caption "When the deadline comes too close." The tweet received more than 242,000 likes and 79,000 retweets in less than two years (shown below, center).

Later that year, on December 6th, Tumblr ^[6] user johnlockiseternal posted the image and labeled parts of the horse different seasons of the television show Sherlock. They captioned the post, "I am not exactly a meme person but that horse drawing thing quite accurately represents BBC Sherlock." Within one year, the post received more than 5,200 notes (shown below, right).

Flaming Horse Rating

In 2022, a variant of the meme known as "Flaming Horse Rating" began to be used to rate various movie franchises. On September 16th, 2022, Twitter^[8] user @ShadowKnightPK posted a tweet rating Netflix's Daredevil series, gathering 40,000 likes and 3,000 retweets in nearly six days (seen below).

The trend became more popularized in consecutive days, with Twitter users @espiedi^[9] and @oshayon^[10] posting Flaming Horse Ratings for Marvel's Spiderman movies and The Last Of Us video games. The tweets gathered over 400,000 likes and 6,000 likes, respectively (seen below).