What is Advice Animals?

Advice Animals are image macros featuring an animal, person, or character on a colored background with captioned text representing a specific personality archetype. The format uses white Impact font text at the top and bottom of the image.

Where did Advice Animals come from?

The genre originated from Advice Dog, posted by Evan Herrington on the Mushroom Kingdom forums on September 7, 2006, featuring a puppy on a rainbow color wheel background.

What does Advice Animals mean?

Each Advice Animal character represents a "stock character" or archetype, like the paranoid person (Paranoid Parrot) or the lazy bachelor (Foul Bachelor Frog). The "advice" in the name comes from the original Advice Dog, which gave absurd suggestions.

How do you use Advice Animals?

Pick a character template that fits the personality or situation you want to joke about, then add top text for the setup and bottom text for the punchline. Tools like Memegenerator.net were built specifically for this purpose.

Is Advice Animals still popular?

Advice Animals peaked in the early 2010s and the format has largely been replaced by newer meme styles. The genre's influence is still widely felt in modern meme templates, earning it classic status.

Who created the first Advice Animal?

Evan Herrington created Advice Dog in 2006 on the Mushroom Kingdom forums. He placed a Labrador puppy photo on a rainbow background inspired by Katamari Damacy.

What was Memegenerator.net?

Built by Ferenc Somos and registered on March 18, 2009, it was the first web application designed specifically for creating Advice Animal-style image macros with custom captions.

When was the r/AdviceAnimals subreddit created?

The subreddit was created on December 7, 2010, and quickly became the genre's main hub, spawning original characters like Schrute Facts and Hood Dad.

Can AI generate Advice Animals?

Yes. In 2018, Stanford researchers built a system trained on 400,000 meme examples that could generate original Advice Animal captions indistinguishable from human-made ones.

What's the difference between Advice Animals and rage comics?

Advice Animals use photo-based templates with Impact font captions, while rage comics use hand-drawn faces in multi-panel strips. Some rage comic faces (Forever Alone, Y U No Guy) crossed over into the Advice Animal format.

Why do Advice Animals use the color wheel background?

The rainbow pinwheel originated with the first Advice Dog image, where creator Evan Herrington used it as a reference to the "royal rainbow" from Katamari Damacy. It became the genre's visual signature.

Was there an Advice Animals mobile app?

Yes, an iOS app offered 20 built-in character templates and let users create macros from their own photos, sharing them to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Advice Animals

2006Image macro series / meme genreclassic

Published March 10, 2026 · Updated March 18, 2026

Also known as: Advice Dog spin-offs · stock-character macros

Advice Animals are a genre of image macros featuring an animal or person on a colored background with captioned text representing a stock character archetype. Originating from the Advice Dog meme in 2006, the format spawned hundreds of character templates and became one of the most recognizable meme formats of the late 2000s and early 2010s. The genre defined an entire era of internet humor and laid the groundwork for modern meme templates.

advice animals image macro memes early 2010s memes reddit memes character archetype memes

Overview

Advice Animals are image macros that pair an animal, person, or character with captioned text to represent a specific personality type or archetype4. The standard format places the subject against a multi-colored pinwheel background (though some use the unedited original photo), with white Impact font text at the top and bottom of the image5. Each "character" represents a consistent persona: Courage Wolf is aggressively motivational, Foul Bachelor Frog is gross and lazy, Paranoid Parrot overthinks everything.

The format works like a cast of stock characters6. Each image template carries built-in context, so the audience immediately understands the joke's framing before reading the punchline. Top text sets up the situation, bottom text delivers the twist. This structure made Advice Animals extremely easy to create and share, fueling their explosive spread across forums, Reddit, and social media.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Mushroom Kingdom forums (original Advice Dog), Memegenerator.net (format popularization)

Key People

Evan Herrington, Ferenc Somos

Date

2006

The whole genre traces back to a single image: Advice Dog. On September 7, 2006, Evan Herrington posted a photo of a Labrador retriever puppy against a rainbow color wheel background on the Mushroom Kingdom forums4. Herrington said the rainbow background was inspired by the "royal rainbow" effect from the Katamari Damacy video game series4.

The original Advice Dog gave absurd, often terrible "advice" in the Impact font caption format. The character's appeal was the contrast between the cute puppy face and the unhinged suggestions. Other forum users quickly adopted the template structure, swapping in different animals and personas while keeping the color wheel background and two-line caption format.

How It Spread

The format stayed relatively niche on forums until dedicated creation tools brought it to a mass audience. On March 18, 2009, Ferenc Somos launched Memegenerator.net, the first web application purpose-built for creating these image macros4. The site let anyone pick a template, add custom top and bottom text, and share the result with a watermark. Similar builders soon appeared on Memebase and Quickmeme4.

Reddit's r/AdviceAnimals subreddit, created on December 7, 2010, became the genre's central hub4. The subreddit quickly became a factory for new characters, producing originals like Misunderstood D-Bag, Rasta Science Teacher, Hood Dad, Internet Husband, Harmless Scout Leader, and Schrute Facts4. By August 2011, the subreddit had over 56,000 subscribers and would eventually become one of Reddit's default subreddits.

Google search data shows interest in "advice animals" spiking in December 2010, the same month the subreddit launched4. Courage Wolf was among the most searched Advice Animals during that period, though its popularity dropped sharply after peaking that December4.

Tumblr also became a major distribution point. Numerous single-topic blogs cataloged specific Advice Animal series, and some characters originated from artwork first shared on the platform, including Hipster Kitty and Art Student Owl4. The genre thrived under Tumblr's tag system, aggregated under "#advice animals"4.

The format crossed into mobile in the early 2010s. An official Advice Animals iOS app let users create their own macros from 20 built-in templates including Bachelor Frog, Philosoraptor, and Paranoid Parrot, plus any image from the user's photo library3. The app supported sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and email3.

Platforms

Reddit9GAGTumblrFacebookTwitter

Timeline

2006

R/AdviceAnimals subreddit created on Reddit

2007-01-01

Advice Animals started spreading across social media platforms

2008-2010

Explosive growth with numerous sub-formats emerging

2009-01-01

Brands and companies started using Advice Animals in marketing

2011-2012

Peak popularity as meme format dominates internet

2013-2014

Decline begins as reaction images and video memes gain popularity

2015+

Format largely abandoned in mainstream meme culture

View on Google Trends

How to Use This Meme

Select an animal format appropriate to your message. Image editing tools allow adding text to the image, typically in Impact font. The format emphasizes relatability and humor derived from universal experiences.

Find the Advice Animals template on Imgflip or a similar meme generator

Think of a funny or relatable caption that fits the format

Add your text to the template using the meme generator

Share your creation on social media or in group chats

Create Your Own

Cultural Impact

Advice Animals fundamentally shaped how people think about meme formats. The concept of a reusable image template with customizable text, where the image provides context and the text provides the joke, became the dominant meme structure for years. Characters like Bad Luck Brian, Success Kid, and Scumbag Steve broke out of niche internet spaces and became widely understood cultural shorthand5.

The format's influence extended into academic research. In 2018, Stanford researchers Abel L. Peirson V and E. Meltem Tolunay built a machine learning system trained on 400,000 image-label-caption triplets from Advice Animal-style memes1. Their system used a pre-trained Inception-v3 network with a long short-term memory model to auto-generate captions. The researchers found their AI "produces original memes that cannot on the whole be differentiated from real ones," though they acknowledged that capturing humor across cultures was the greatest challenge1. They also noted a significant bias in the training dataset "towards expletive, racist and sexist memes"1.

The Cheezburger Network's Memebase site became one of the largest aggregators of Advice Animal content, helping push the format from forum culture into mainstream internet browsing2. Rage comic faces like Forever Alone and Y U No Guy also crossed over into the Advice Animal format, blurring the line between the two meme genres4.

The Wikipedia article on image macros identifies Advice Animals as one of the most significant subtypes of the format, alongside LOLcats5. The article describes how characters like Bad Luck Brian, Success Kid, and Scumbag Steve each carry specific narrative roles: unfortunate situations, everyday good luck, and unfriendly behavior, respectively5.

Fun Facts

The color wheel background that defines the genre was inspired by a visual effect from Katamari Damacy, a Japanese video game about rolling objects into a giant ball4.

Memegenerator.net was the first dedicated tool for making Advice Animals, launching over two years after the original Advice Dog post4.

Stanford's meme-generating AI was trained on 2,600 unique image-label pairs and produced results humans couldn't reliably distinguish from real memes1.

The r/AdviceAnimals subreddit produced enough original characters (Hood Dad, Internet Husband, Harmless Scout Leader) to function as its own meme incubator4.

The iOS Advice Animals app required only iOS 3.0, dating it to the very early days of the App Store3.

Derivatives & Variations

Success Kid

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Socially Awkward Penguin

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Insanity Wolf

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Courage Wolf

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Confession Bear

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Malicious Advice Mallard

A variation of Advice Animals

(2006)

Frequently Asked Questions

References (6)

1
Dank learning system autogenerates memes | TechCruncharticle
2
Memebase - All Your Memes In Our Base - Funny Memes - Cheezburgerarticle
3
Advice Animals for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Storearticle
4
Advice Animals - Know Your Memeencyclopedia
5
Image macroencyclopedia
6
Stock characterencyclopedia