About

Sad Emoji is an exploitable image macros depicting a pixellated 3d emoji looking sad with white-gloved hands hanging by his side. The image is generally set to the song "The Reason Why" by Japanese artist Ayasa and is used to depict sadness or disappointment in a variety of memes.

Origin

On February 2nd, 2005,^[1] an app for creating custom emojis was released under the name "EmotiGuy".^[2] The app is credited for the creation of several non-Unicode emojis, including Picardía. The earliest known image of a sad emoji in the style of EmotiGuy was uploaded to Imgur on July 19th, 2021, by user BeanMac. The image was then subsequently uploaded to Shutterstock in May 2022.^[3]

On July 10th, 2021, iFunny^[10] user @god__follow_for_more__2019 posted a meme that used the aforementioned emoji and was set to violin music ("The Reason Why" by Ayasa). The post proceeded to gather over 5,000 smiles in over a year (seen below).

The violin music originates from a song named "The Reason Why" by Japanese artist Ayasa, which can be accessed via a March 4th, 2019, upload to her YouTube^[6] channel, where it gathered over 10 million views in roughly three years (seen below).

Spread

The earliest known video upload of just the sad emoji with hands set to violin music was posted to iFunny on August 1st, 2021, by user Maxson, where it gathered over 800 smiles in roughly a year (seen below). ^[11] The video was also reuploaded to YouTube on September 6th, 2021, by users Magier,^[4] where it gathered over 4.7 views in over a year, and ColebonCh on September 17th, gathering over 34,000 views in a similar timeframe.^[5]

The visual soon became a reaction image and video used to depict sadness or disappointment. On May 11th, 2022, the image was used in a Tumblr post by user campyvillain,^[7] gathering over 33,000 notes in seven months (seen below).

On July 23rd, 2022, Redditor creapy_creampy posted a meme using a video of the sad emoji set to violin music to /r/shitposting,^[8] gathering over 20,000 upvotes in roughly four months (seen below).

On November 21st, Redditor Voidityzz then posted an image using the emoji to /r/shitposting,^[9] gathering over 30,000 upvotes in less than a month (seen below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References