[His smile and motivation: gone]
About
“His Smile And Optimism: Gone” is a reaction image used to depict a loss of happiness and/or hope with images of characters being depressed or otherwise upset, and a caption below.
Origin
The original image is a crop based off a screencap from a subbed Japanese TV show’s GameCenter GX episode 55, which originally aired on October 24, 2007[1]. In the episode, the host Shinya Arino had continued to play a side-scrolling platformer video game named The Quest of Ki[2] from the previous episode.
Spread
The earliest known archived example of the image (pictured below) comes from a fighting game general thread on 4chan’s /vg/ (video game generals) board on February 29th, 2012[3].
Various Examples
Search Interest
External References
[1]TheTVDB – GameCenter CX
[2]Strategy Wiki – The Quest of Ki
[3]archive.moe – Earliest archive example