About

Fuze Elbow Dropping a Hostage refers to a series of memes based on a fanart of Rainbow Six Siege character Fuze performing an elbow drop move on a hostage. The format gained significant spread on Reddit in late June 2019, with memes often used to illustrate someone or something gaining an upper hand, dominating over something else.

Origin

On May 26th, 2019, Tumblr user hellonearth-iii posted a fanart of Rainbow Six Siege character Shuhrat "Fuze" Kessikbayev elbow dropping a crawling hostage, with the post receiving over 460 likes and reblogs in six weeks.^[1] The fanart is a reference to a popular meme inside the game community spawned by the Fuze players' tendency to accidentally (or, later, intentionally) kill hostages during multiplayer matches.

Spread

On June 22nd, Redditor alexthegame17 posted the image to /r/Rainbow6 subreddit where it gained over 21,900 upvotes in three weeks.^[2] On June 24th, Redditor TheCommie-Cat posted two first known memes based on the image to /r/HistoryMemes and /r/memes subreddit (shown below, left and right).^[3][4]

In the following days, the format gained significant popularity on Reddit, with notable examples posted in /r/dankmemes,^[5] /r/memes^[6] and other communities.

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References