About
Awkward Moment Seal is an advice animal image macro series featuring a seal with a wide-eyed, closed mouth expression that seems to imply embarrassment. The captions describe common awkward situations that would cause someone embarrassment or a feeling of social discomfort similar to socially awkward penguin.
Origin
On April 17th, 2014, Redditor walrusmeats[1] submitted the photo featuring a seal which appeared embarrassed with the caption, “I need to shit but my girlfriend won’t go home,” to the /r/AdviceAnimals[2] subreddit. Walrusmeats titled the image “Introducing squeamish seal,” and in less than a week the image gained over 400 comments and over 17,000 upvotes.
The next day Redditor Honorato_[7] posted an example of the meme to the /r/AdviceAnimals[8] subreddit titled “So are we doing a Awkward/Bad Moment Seal?” The submission received over 4,000 upvotes in less than a week.
Spread
On April 18th, the meme was covered by Mashable[4] and UpRoxx[5]. The same day examples of the meme were also featured on the Tumblr blog TastefullyOffensive[6]. In less than a week the post gained over 13,000 notes.
An example of the image macro landed on Reddit’s front page on April 21st. It received more than 3,000 upvotes in less than 24 hours.
Notable Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1]Reddit – walrusmeats
[2]Reddit – Squeamish Seal
[3]Twitter – SoVeryAwkward
[4]Mashable – Awkward Moment Seal Is the Meme for All Your Slippery Situations
[5]Mashable – Meme Watch: Awkward Moment Seal Is Taking The Internet By Storm Because We’ve All Been There
[6]Tumblr – tastefullyoffensive