Always Has Been

Origin¶

The image shows two astronauts in orbit. One looks down at Earth and realises something — “Wait, it’s all…?” — and the second, standing behind him with a pistol drawn, answers: “Always has been.”

The composition has a longer history than most people assume. A crude MS Paint precursor appeared on r/dankmemes on December 11, 2016, built around flat-earth jokes. The version that became the template was posted anonymously to 4chan on August 7, 2018, with the caption “Wait, it’s all America? Always has been,” and established the two key elements: the dawning realisation and the gun that makes the answer non-negotiable.

What it means / how it’s used¶

The format reveals that something was secretly true the entire time — and that the person revealing it is prepared to enforce that fact.

The gun is the crucial detail. Without it, the meme is a mild “actually” correction. With it, the second astronaut is not explaining but silencing: the revelation comes with the implication that the first astronaut now knows too much. That threat is what gives the format its comic edge and separates it from every other “surprising truth” template.

Common uses:

• Discovering that a whole category is really one thing wearing different labels.
• Realising an institution, industry, or hobby is built on something unexpected.
• Fandom jokes about a plot detail that recontextualises everything.
• Self-referential versions where the realisation is about the meme itself.

How it spread¶

The template’s most famous variation arrived on October 17, 2019, when an iFunny user posted an Ohio version — “Wait, it’s all Ohio?” — which took over 46,000 reactions and 1,700 comments within a year and permanently fused the format to the internet’s running Ohio joke.

Peak circulation came in 2020. On June 7, 2020, a high-resolution version posted to r/memes took 33,000+ points, and that upgrade mattered: the crisp astronaut artwork replaced the earlier MS Paint versions and made the template look deliberate rather than improvised. Variations proliferated through that summer — a June 19, 2020 Bugsnax edit among them — and by July 14, 2020 meme aggregators were publishing roundup galleries of the best versions.

Notable examples & variations¶

• “Wait, it’s all Ohio?” — the single most reproduced version.
• Game and franchise edits replacing Earth with a fictional world.
• Industry and workplace versions revealing what a job actually consists of.
• Versions that stack a third astronaut for a chain of escalating revelations.
• Text-only uses of “always has been” as a reply, with no image.

Legacy / cultural impact¶

Always Has Been is one of the defining meme formats of 2020, and among the most linguistically successful of the past decade — “always has been” now works as a standalone phrase, deployed in conversation by people who have never seen the astronauts.

Its structure has also proved unusually resilient. Most two-panel templates express preference or contrast; this one expresses revelation plus enforcement, a combination almost nothing else covers. That specificity has kept it in rotation years after the formats it competed with in 2020 disappeared.