About

Fullmetal Alchemist Handshake or Alexander Armstrong and Sig Curtis Shaking Hands is an exploitable image macro template depicting a handshake that takes place between the characters Alexander Armstrong and Sig Curtis in the 2009 anime series Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. The handshake became a prominent object-labeling meme in a similar manner to Epic Handshake during the 2010s and early 2020s in which people would add text or images to the two characters to show mutual agreement on something.

Origin

Within the context of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, the handshake occurs in the middle of episode 55, taking place during a battle between the homunculus Sloth and the two men, Alexander Armstrong and Sig Curtis. A video of this fight, including the handshake scene at the 2:11 mark, was uploaded to YouTube on November 22nd, 2013, by the channel RagingIsMyHobby,^[1] where it went on to get over 1.5 million views in nine years (shown below).

On May 24th, 2014, Redditor gigawawa uploaded the first known example of the scene being used as a meme in the form of a Demotivational Poster to the /r/KeepBromanceAlive^[5] subreddit with the caption "THE MANLIEST BROMANCE EVER" (seen below). On October 4th, 2014, Imgur user MrWolfwood^[2] then uploaded a blank template of the meme, using the title as the meme context, calling it "When that one user upvotes your -1 post" and received over 34,000 views in eight years.

Spread

The handshake between Armstrong and Curtis continued to spread as an object-labeling and exploitable meme template over the following years. For example, on April 22, 2019, Twitter user @CloudTastics^[3] uploaded a version of the meme that used it for its object-labeling potential, with Elon Musk used on one side and Edward Elrich from the anime on the other, gaining over 7,500 likes in three years (shown below).

On May 13th, 2021, a redraw version of the meme was made, using characters from Helltaker as the ones doing the handshake, which was posted to Twitter by the artist @llVeronesi^[4] and gained over 105 likes in one year (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References