About

Running Away Balloon is a two-panel exploitable webcomic featuring a grey character or white, simplistic man attempting to reach a yellow balloon or ball but being held back by a pink character pulling them backward. The meme has been used to express frustrations with the subject's limitations.

Origin

On April 21st, 2017, Facebook ^[1] user and webcomic artist Superlmer shared the original comic. In the original, the balloon is labeled "opportunities," and the pink character is labeled "shyness." The post received more than 158,000 shares, 61,000 reactions and 7,300 comments (shown below).

Roughly two weeks later, Twitter ^[2] user @drunktwi shared a Russian-language variation with the caption, "When I planned to go to bed early, that would be good to sleep." The tweet received more than 620 likes and 215 retweets in less than three years (shown below).

Spread

On December 8th, 2017, a variation was posted on 9GAG that labeled the yellow balloon "beautiful girls" and the pink character labeled "my face my luck my empty pockets." The post received more than 15,000 points and 475 comments in less than two years (shown below, left).

The following year, on November 6th, 2018, Redditor U_ARE_BBQ shared a variation that received more than 900 points (98% upvoted) and 25 comments (shown below, center).

Over the next year, others continued to share variations of the meme (example below, right).

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

Not available.

External References