About

Ozon's Salute refers to images of Russian streamer Andrei "Ozon" Ozonovsky (Андрей "Озон" Озоновский) crying, saluting and screaming at the screen. Initially circulated by Russian users as reaction images, in 2018 the images reached mainstream popularity on Twitter and Reddit.

Origin

On July 10th, 2017, a YouTube fan channel uploaded a segment of Russian YouTube streamer OZON671GAMES3's broadcast titled "БУХОЙ ОЗОН ПЛАЧЕТ НА СТРИМЕ" ("Drunk Ozon crying on stream").^[1] In the uploaded recording, the streamer, visually drunk, watches a music video for the song "The Cuckoo" ("Кукушка") by singer Polina Gagarina,^[2] written for Russian-Ukranian biographical war film Battle for Sevastopol. The streamer reacts to certain moments in the video by crying and saluting the screen.

Spread

In late 2017, an image gained popularity on Russian-language imageboard 2ch.hk (Двач) as a reaction image, with the earliest known use^[3] by an anonymous user on December 22nd, 2017 in a Life is Strange thread (shown below, center).

On February 23rd, 2018, entertainment community Trixinity^[4] uploaded a collection of Defender of the Fatherland Day memes, including a meme using Ozon's reaction originally created by an unknown user.

Through 2018, the memes based on the image received further spread among Russian-speaking users, gaining significant popularity in VK meme communities.^[5] The Ozon's image was often combined with other similar reaction images (examples below) and was used in a similar manner to Press F to Pay Respects.

Through 2018, posts containing the Ozon's Salute, often as parts of larger salute collages, spread among English-speaking users on 4chan, Reddit, Twitter and other online platforms. For example, on July 21, 2018, Redditor^[6] WarlockWeeb posted a salute collage containing Ozon's Salute to /r/DarlingInTheFranxx subreddit. The post gained over 500 upvotes in six months.

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References