Andrew Tate Shocked Face

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Andrew Tate Shocked Face is an exploitable screenshot of the influencer looking wide-eyed and slack-jawed, pulled from a February 2021 YouTube rant. It went viral in January 2023 as Twitter users compared the frame to Wojaks, Soyjaks and cartoon characters to mock his self-styled alpha male image.

Overview

Andrew Tate Shocked Face, sometimes called Andrew Tate Soyjak or Surprised Andrew Tate, is a screenshot of the kickboxer-turned-influencer caught mid-reaction with wide eyes and a hanging jaw1. The unflattering frame made Tate look strikingly similar to a Soyjak, which was the entire joke: a man branding himself as the ultimate alpha male reduced to the internet's go-to face for cringing beta reactions3.

The image works as a pure exploitable. People paste it next to cartoon anchovies, Wojak drawings, Meme Man and Squidward, letting the visual match do the punchline1. Its rise mapped neatly onto the collapse of Tate's public image after his December 2022 human trafficking arrest in Romania, giving the meme extra bite for anyone piling on3.

How It Spread

Business Insider kept recycling the screenshot through late 2022, including as the header of a December 15th, 2022 story about Logan Paul calling Tate a hypocrite5. The image did not really flip into a meme, though, until January 2023, when the pop-culture Twitter account PopCrave posted it on January 10th and racked up about 100,100 likes in a week6. Six days earlier, on January 4th, Facebook user Eggs Benedict had already compared the photo to the SpongeBob anchovies with the caption "i don't know how dudes can sit here and call him 'the alpha male' when he's literally the anchovies blueprint," collecting around 5,500 reactions and 42,000 shares in 13 days9.

The replies under PopCrave's tweet turned into a comparison contest. On the same day, Twitter user Ice__Bearrr lined the frame up next to Meme Man for roughly 53,200 likes in a week7. On January 11th, 36angstroms matched it to Squidward using the "When I'm in a Competition and My Opponent Is" template, picking up about 5,100 likes in six days8.

The Wojak angle was locked in the same day by Twitter user Bolverk15, who tweeted "bro how is this the dude people consider to be some savior of masculinity, literal wojak" for around 157,700 likes in six days10. Meme creators in the replies started drawing him as one: jorleifur posted a Wojak rendition on January 11th that hit about 9,700 likes11, and on January 12th, kishuswaay221 uploaded another Wojak version that pulled roughly 6,200 likes12.

How to Use This Meme

The image is used two main ways. As a straight reaction, it typically stands in for genuine or mock shock at something a poster considers pathetic, often paired with a caption calling out cringe alpha-male behavior10. As a comparison meme, people commonly place the frame side by side with a cartoon character, Wojak drawing or other meme face whose expression matches, letting the visual likeness carry the joke without needing much caption text7.

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