Adios

Meaning

What does Adios mean?

Adios, also known as Adios Wormhole is a popular image macro meme format, depicting a man wearing a red T-shirt and a red durag, looking towards a wormhole, or a portal, paired with the phrase “Adios” in the captions.

Online, it is used to associate with departure, usually mixed with stoic and more often ironic sentiments.

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Origin

What's the origin of Adios?

The original image of the wormhole comes from the website Cuded, where it was uploaded on September 12th, 2012.

The site accredited the picture to Imaginary Foundation, an establishment from Switzerland with their main profile being centered around research around reasoning and imagination, developing illustrations for their topics.

The image depicts a man in a trenchcoat and hat, walking toward the mouth of a wormhole, while carrying a suitcase.

Despite this, the “Adios” meme template wasn’t created until 8 years after.

Spread & Usage

How did Adios spread?

The first case of the aforementioned image being used in a meme context was uploaded to Tumblr on February 7th, 2020 by user crtter, using the original illustration by Imaginary Foundation.

While the exact origin of the photoshop edit, featuring the man in red is not known, it started appearing within a month after the Tumblr post, with the earliest example being uploaded to Facebook on March 6th, by the page Conversationes de Whatsapp con Stickers as their profile page.

Since then, the meme “Adios” would appear on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr as a humorous reaction image macro.

The template has produced several variations and photoshop edits since then, with various cultural icons entering the portal, saying “Goodbye” in their own language.

Animal portal memes have also been closely tied to the “Adios” format, appearing in both image macro mashups, as well as YouTube compilations.

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External resources

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