About

Sailor Mercury Eating a Burger is a series of redraw memes based on an image of a hand holding a candid photo of the character Sailor Mercury from Sailor Moon eating a hamburger. The scene appears in episode 27 of Sailor Moon, which aired in October 1992. It started to gain viral spread online around 2017 and first became the subject of redraws in May 2020 alongside the revival of the Sailor Moon redraw challenge, continuing to inspire redraws over the following years.

Origin

On October 10th, 1992, season one episode 27 of Sailor Moon, titled “Crushing on Ami: The Boy Who Can See the Future,” aired in Japan.^[1] At one point in the episode, Usagi allows Urawa to have a photograph of Ami, aka Sailor Mercury, eating a burger.

The image of the burger photo has been posted online numerous times, including a May 16th, 2016, post by X^[2] user @sailorhg captioned, "a photo of me pursuing my favorite hobby," garnering around 50 likes in eight years (shown below). On November 13th, 2017, the Tumblr^[3] page burgers-in-anime posted the image, garnering over 300 notes in seven years.

In May 2020, the "Sailor Moon redraw" challenge, an internet challenge originating in 2019 in which artists are encouraged to redraw an image of Sailor Moon, was revived on X. On May 19th, 2019, X^[4] user @3rd_nrg posted the burger image, writing, "The Sailor Moon redraw should've been this frame," garnering over 66,000 likes in five years. The post inspired numerous photoshops and redraws of the image over the following days in both the quote-reposts and through individual posts to X,^[5] DeviantArt^[6] and other sites (examples shown below).^[7]

Spread

On January 23rd, 2024, X^[8] user @Jaq_artz posted the original burger image, writing, "'Draw your OC like this' idea," garnering over 5,000 likes and 800 reposts in six days. The post inspired numerous redraws of the image, including posts by X users @LynFFXIV^[9] and @sonokido^[10] on January 25th, garnering over 1,300 and 2,300 likes, respectively, in four days (shown below, left and right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References