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