About

The Awkward Foreigner is the name given to an exploitable image that showcases a foreigner or a tourist complaining to a local family that the country he's visiting or the people that live in it don't look like a (usually outdated) stereotype by opening the conversation with "It's Actually A Bit Shocking Coming To X." Originally created to portray American tourists in Europe, the format evolved as a redraw series and phrasal template to include various nationalities, ethnicities and diasporas.

Origin

The image was posted for the first time on the 4chan board /int/ on November 11th, 2017, in an Amerimutt meme thread.^[1] The image shows an American tourist visiting Bavaria in southeast Germany and explaining to a local family his disappointment in the fact that Germans weren't wearing lederhosen and drinking beer, whilst claiming that his "1/12th German" family kept the traditions more alive (shown below).

It's actually a bit shocking coming to bavaria, I thought everyone would be wearing lederhosen and drink beer. My family is 1/12th german and we seem to keep the traditions more alive than here. It's sad how far Europe has fallen from…

Spread

The image was reposted over 1,000 times on /pol/ and various other 4chan^[2] boards in the following years before spreading to other platforms, such as Reddit, where it spawned various edits. For example, on April 28th, 2020, Redditor AnonymousVariant posted to /r/TNOmod with an image titled "Fyurer Gutrum Vagner's state visit to Germania," which garnered over 1,100 points in one year (shown below, left).^[3] On June 22nd, 2020, an edit showing Astolfo trying to promote fascism was posted on /r/worldpolitics by user CoomerRemover. The post received over 45 points in one year (shown below, right).^[4]

On April 18th, 2020, an edit captioned "Carthaginian visiting a now very Hellenized Tyre circa 200 BC" was posted on Twitter by user @ByzLevant, which garnered over 600 likes and over 60 retweets in one year (shown, below).^[5]

A version of the meme template that uses the "stay away from my family" line started to pick up steam in October 2020, with a user on /lit/^[8] posting a meme involving Gnosticism (shown below).

On March 10th, 2021, an edit titled "Neckbeards on a vacation" was posted to /r/justneckbeardthings by user Yourfellowyellowdog, garnering over 22,000 points in 10 months (shown below, left).^[6] On November 7th, 2021, another edit was posted to /r/moviescirclejerk by user Hail-china, and received over 1,500 points in two months (shown below, right).^[7]

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References