About

"It's been 3000 years…" is a memorable quote uttered by AZ, a traveling Pokémon trainer who appears in Nintendo's sixth-generation Pokemon video games Pokémon X and Y, upon coming across a rare creature that he has been waiting to see for thousands of years. Online, the quote is most commonly used in reaction images to convey feelings of bittersweet closure or overwhelming joy in response to the long-awaited arrival of something after a prolonged delay.

Origin

In Pokemon X and Y, the first pair of titles in Nintendo's Generation VI Pokémon video games released in 2013, the player meets a mysterious man named AZ on Route 13. Shortly after the introduction of the character, AZ encounters a unique variant of the Floette Pokemon known as "The Eternal Flower." Upon seeing it, AZ falls to his knees, cries and proclaims in joy that "it's been 3000 years," implying he had known the creature very well long before their reunion.

The earliest known use of the dialogue scene as a reaction image can be found on the r/pokemon subreddit, uploaded by Redditor Kyouya in a post titled "When PokeBank arrives gif"^[1] on December 30th, 2013. The post was made in response to the long-awaited arrival of Pokémon Bank, an online application for the Nintendo 3DS, the launch date of which was postponed due to the issues of server outages upon its initial release.^[2] Prior to its archival, the post accumulated 1,680 upvotes and 99 comments.

Spread

The most popular instance of the reaction image series on Tumblr was posted by user monadontriy on July 17th, 2014, with regards to a Homestuck update. The post has accumulated over 4,400 notes.^[3]

On October 30th, 2014, Redditor Kyouya used an edited gif of the scene once again on/r/pokemon, this time reacting to the release of the Pokemon games Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire. This post gained 658 upvotes and 47 comments.^[4]

Examples

External References