Oh-Il Nam Standing and Sitting

Editor's Note: This entry contains major spoilers for Squid Game; read at your own caution.

About

Oh-Il Nam Standing and Sitting refers to an exploitable image macro of the elderly character Oh Il-Nam sitting in one image with a second depicting him standing, taken from the 2021 Netflix series Squid Game. Over the course of the show, the character is seen going from a happy, cheerful disposition to sitting in one spot looking very depressed. The use of one of the pictures separately, or both together as a contrast, became a notable meme format following the series widespread virality in late 2021.

Origin

On September 17th, 2021, episode one, titled "Red Light, Green Light," of the South Korean survival drama series Squid Game premiered on Netflix.^[5] In the episode, the character Oh Il-Nam, also known as Player 001, is introduced. Unlike other characters, Oh Il-Nam participates in the deadly games because he has an inoperable brain tumor that will kill him soon. Because of this brain tumor, he is seen having a very casual, laissez-faire attitude towards the red light, green light portion of the game, which is where the standing image used in the meme format originates (clip seen below). The image of him sitting comes later on in the series when they're in the sleeping quarters in-between games.

On September 27th, 2021, Twitter^[1] user @GQBKR posted a tweet using an image of Oh Il-Nam casting a blank stare from episode six of the series, "Gganbu." The tweet (shown below), captioned "Me in the club after being forced to go out," received nearly 75,000 likes in 10 days.

Spread

The image of Il-Ham sitting down, paired with sad or depressing photoshopped captions, was the first to spread as a standalone image. On October 2nd, 2021, the subreddit /r/SquidGame^[2] saw one such meme uploaded by the Redditor creepyfacts9 that earned 7,800 upvotes in 16 days (shown below).

The first meme to combine both of the images into one came from Redditor Shami1111, who posted it to the /r/SquidGame^[3] subreddit on October 7th, 2021, and earned 6,500 upvotes in 11 days (shown below).

A meme that used only the version of Oh Il-Nam standing was posted to the subreddit /r/Memes^[4] on October 13th, 2021, by MysteriousEntity and is a play on the common 0.01% of Germs meme, earning 11,100 upvotes in five days (shown below).

Various Examples

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