About

"Congratulations! You Are Being Rescued" refers to a memorable quote by character K-2SO from 2016 film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Online, an image macro based on the scene has been used in memes about undesired help and malicious intentions disguised as providing assistance.

Origin

On December 16th, Star Wars prequel Rogue One: A Star Wars Story premiered in the United States.^[1] In one scene of the movie, reprogrammed Imperial enforcer droid K-2SO, voiced by Alan Tudyk, grabs the main protagonist Jyn Erso, throws her onto the ground and congratulates her on being rescued.

Congratulations! You are being rescued. Please do not resist.

Spread

On January 3rd, 2017, Instagram^[2] fan account reyisbaeok uploaded a three-panel screen capture of the scene, The post gained over 1,400 likes in two years (shown below). On July 15th, 2017, Instagram^[3] user queen.of.jakku made a similar post with slightly altered caption which gained over 300 likes in 18 months.

On July 23rd, a since-deleted Reddit^[4] account posted the earliest available meme based on the scene to /r/anthologymemes subreddit. The post gained over 1,500 retweets in 18 months.

On November 5th, 2017, the image created by queen.of.jakku was featured in a collection of congratulations memes by The Daily Dot.^[5]

In March 2018, the format gained popularity in /r/historymemes subreddit. On March 1st, 2018, Redditor^[6] Whysong823 a version of the meme which received over 600 upvotes in six months (shown below, left). On March 5th, Redditor^[7] skyslopes posted another meme based on the macro, gaining over 11,900 upvotes in the same period (shown below, right).

Throught the following months, the meme saw consistent use on Reddit. In 2019, several highly-upvoted versions of the meme with the middle panel cut out were posted to /r/memes^[8] and /r/dankmemes^[9] subreddit.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References