WW2 vs. WW3 Pin-Up Posters

About

WW2 vs. WW3 Pin-Up Posters or War Never Changes by Shadman is an exploitable meme format that uses a webcomic by the artist Shadman showing a World War II soldier in the upper panel looking at a poster of a typical pin-up girl and a World War III soldier in the bottom panel looking at an image of Belle Delphine doing an ahegao face. The comic was originally posted to Twitter in January 2020 and became the subject of photoshops over the following years.

Origin

On January 15th, 2020, Twitter^[1] artist @shadbase a piece of artwork captioned "War never changes," showing a WWII soldier in one panel looking at a pin-up girl poster and a WWIII soldier in another panel looking at Belle Delphine, garnering over 59,000 likes in three years (shown below).

Spread

The image gained viral spread on Reddit over the following days. On January 15th, 2020, it was posted to the subreddit /r/shadman,^[2] garnering over 9,700 upvotes in three years. On January 16th, it was then posted to /r/im14andthisisdeep,^[3] /r/JustBootThings^[4] and /r/TIHI,^[5] garnering over 600, 9,400 and 5,700 upvotes, respectively, in the same span of time. On January 17th, a Redditor posted an edit of the meme to /r/Komi_san,^[6] garnering over 5,200 upvotes (shown below). This is the earliest known edit.

The meme template was requested twice on the /r/MemeTemplatesOfficial^[7][8] subreddit on January 20th, 2020. On June 4th, 2021, a Redditor posted a version of the meme to /r/Hololive,^[12] garnering over 8,400 upvotes in two years (shown below).

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On September 14th, 2021, the template was then uploaded to /r/MemeTemplatesOfficial.^[9] On February 24th, 2022, Twitter^[10] user @DonieDarko3 posted a version of the meme featuring a poster of VTuber Gawr Gura, garnering over 700 likes in a year (shown below, left). On March 2nd, a version of the meme was posted to /r/blursedimages,^[11] garnering over 5,700 upvotes in a year (shown below, right).

Template

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References