Sitting and Standing Old Man

Origin

Both images come from Squid Game, the Korean survival drama that premiered on Netflix on September 17, 2021 and became the platform’s most-watched series.

The character is Oh Il-nam, Player 001, played by O Yeong-su — an elderly man who enters the games while dying of an inoperable brain tumour, and who approaches the whole ordeal with an unnerving cheerfulness.

The two panels come from different episodes:

• Standing, delighted, from episode 1, “Red Light, Green Light.”
• Sitting, hunched and hollow, from episode 6, “Gganbu” — the episode widely regarded as the series’ emotional peak.

What it means / how it’s used

The format is a two-panel before-and-after contrasting anticipation with reality. The standing image is labelled with the expectation; the sitting image with what actually happened.

Its uses:

• Excitement about a plan, and the plan’s outcome.
• The start of a week, and its end.
• A trailer, and the film itself.
• Any gap between how something felt beforehand and afterwards.

The two frames work because they are the same person in the same setting, so the change reads as something that happened to him rather than a comparison between two subjects. That gives the format an emotional weight most before-and-after templates lack.

How it spread

The images circulated separately before being combined. On September 27, 2021, a Twitter post using the sitting image alone took nearly 75,000 likes within ten days, and on October 2, 2021 a version on the show’s subreddit took 7,800 upvotes in sixteen days.

The combined two-panel format appeared on October 7, 2021, taking 6,500 upvotes in eleven days. It reached general meme communities on October 13, 2021, when a version structured as a parody of the “kills 99.9% of germs” claim took 11,100 upvotes in five days.

The whole cycle ran within about three weeks of the show’s global breakout — an unusually compressed timeline, driven by Squid Game becoming the most-discussed television series in the world almost overnight.

Notable examples & variations

• Expectation-versus-reality pairings across every subject.
• “Start of the week / end of the week” versions.
• Fandom uses about a series’ first and final episodes.
• Versions reversing the order for an uplifting arc.
• Edits using other Squid Game characters in the same structure.

Legacy / cultural impact

Squid Game generated an enormous volume of memes in late 2021 — the dalgona candy challenge, the guards’ masks, the doll — and this is among the few that outlived the show’s initial wave, because it works with no knowledge of the plot at all.

O Yeong-su’s performance also brought him considerable recognition: in January 2022 he won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor in a television series, becoming the first Korean actor to do so. The meme circulates almost entirely detached from that context, as a picture of a man who was looking forward to something and then was not.