Hey Friend Listen / It's Gonna Get Way Worse
About
Hey Friend Listen / It's Gonna Get Way Worse is a copypasta meme of a photo of a Russian soldier traveling through Grozny in the year 2000. The captioned image would later be used as a redraw meme.
Origin
The original image of the Russian soldier first appeared on Tumblr on July 26th, 2016, which was uploaded by insurgent87 (shown below).[1]
The earliest known usage of the image as a captioned meme was on April 16th, 2021, on the r/stalker subreddit. The image was posted by HEPS_08, and received over 1,000 upvotes (shown below).[2]
Spread
On April 20th, 2021, Gianni Matragrano posted a dub of the captioned image to YouTube. The dub (shown below) received over 2 million views in 8 months.[3]
This dub of the scene would later be used to recreate the scene using different characters and games, such as Team Fortress 2 (shown below, left)[4] and Half-Life Opposing Force (shown below, right).[5]
On September 4th, 2021, TJPones posted a redraw of the scene to YouTube which replaced the soldier with Twilight Sparkle, using an AI generator to dub her voice. This version (shown below) received over 3,000 views.[6]
Redraws
Artists would also redraw the scene using various anime and video game characters. On May 5th, 2021, MisterTililing posted a redraw of the scene using Ms. Dandelion from the videogame Girls' Front, which received over 1,000 upvotes.[7]
On June 9th, 2021, haonfest_art posted a redraw of the scene using an original character styled after characters from Tom Clancy's The Division_. This redraw (shown below) received over 2,800 likes.[8] On October 25h, 2021, scarstuff posted a redraw of the scene to Twitter, which uses an NCR soldier from Fallout: New Vegas (shown below, right).[9]
Various Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1] Tumblr – insurgent87 – Grozny,2000
[2] Reddit – r/stalker – Me after fight 2 ambushes in the Red Forest CS and see how I'm almost out of ammo and multiple packs of psy-dogs and 2 bloodsuckers are coming my way
[3] YouTube – Hey friend listen,
[4] YouTube – [SFM] Hey friend listen,
[5] YouTube – It’s Gonna Get Way Worse meme
[6] YouTube – Its Gonna Get a Lot Worse
[7] Reddit – r/girlsfrontline – An advice from the Ms. Dandelion.
[8] Twitter – @haonfest_art – hey listen friend
[9] Twitter – @Scar_stuff – Patrolling the Mojave almost makes you wish for a nuclear winter
![[SFM] Hey friend listen,](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pKMiiNIwh4o/hqdefault.jpg "[SFM] Hey friend listen,")
Top Comments
Blobbem
Dec 26, 2021 at 08:42PM EST
Monster Kid
Dec 26, 2021 at 10:34PM EST