Vanya and Five Drive By Each Other

Origin

The two-panel template comes from The Umbrella Academy season 2, episode 7 (“Öga for Öga”), released on Netflix on July 31, 2020. In the scene, the siblings Vanya Hargreeves and Number Five — played by Elliot Page and Aidan Gallagher — pass each other travelling in opposite directions in separate cars. Each turns and registers the other with a look of dawning recognition, and then they are gone. They do not stop.

The composition is what makes it work as a template: two separate shots, each with a clear subject, framed identically, joined by a moment of mutual awareness that leads nowhere.

What it means / how it’s used

The format is for two things that recognize each other in passing and never connect. It is the visual grammar of a near-miss.

Its most common uses:

• Two people who were briefly in the same place and never met.
• Two ideas, trends, or products that overlapped without ever combining.
• Two versions of the same person at different life stages.
• Two fandoms, communities, or eras acknowledging each other from a distance.

There is a second, more common comedic use where the two labels are the same thing under different names, and the joke is that they were on the same road all along without realizing it. In this mode it functions like a gentler, more wistful cousin of Spider-Man Pointing — recognition instead of accusation.

How it spread

The meme’s early growth happened on Facebook rather than Reddit or Twitter, which is unusual. On August 6, 2020, a user posted the template to an Umbrella Academy meme group, taking over 1,400 reactions and 160 shares in five days. From there it moved through Facebook’s dense network of fandom “posting” groups — communities devoted to a single franchise’s in-jokes — and picked up franchise-specific edits along the way.

It hit Reddit two days later. On August 8 and 9, 2020, two separate posts each cleared over 70,000 upvotes within days, and the format spread to general meme subreddits and Twitter over the following week.

The Facebook-first pattern matters: fandom groups tend to produce templates with more emotional range than joke-first subreddits, and this one carries a note of melancholy that most two-panel formats do not.

Notable examples & variations

• “Two people who would have been friends” jokes about missed connections.
• Historical versions labeling two figures or events that nearly overlapped.
• Self-referential edits where both cars are labeled with different versions of the poster.
• Fandom crossovers assigning the two roles to characters from separate franchises.
• Reversed edits where the cars turn around, used to show two things that did eventually connect.

Legacy / cultural impact

The format is a small but durable entry in the two-panel canon, and one of the few widely used templates to come out of The Umbrella Academy. It endures because it expresses something most meme formats cannot: not conflict, not preference, but the specific feeling of almost.

It also stands as a reminder that Facebook fandom groups remain a real engine of meme creation, even as attention has shifted to short-form video. Several of the 2020-era templates that spread widely on Reddit were built and refined in those groups first.