Kim Jong-un's Visit to South Korea — Kim Jong Un and Moon Jae-in walking hand in hand across the DMZ border marker

Kim Jong-un's Visit to South Korea

2018eventclassic

Published September 4, 2026

On April 27, 2018, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un crossed the border into South Korea for a summit with President Moon Jae-in, the first such visit since the Korean War began. Within hours, Redditors turned photos of the two leaders into a cluster of jokes that ran the top of r/dankmemes and r/gifs for days.

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Overview

The meme wave around Kim Jong-un's Visit to South Korea covers a handful of image and video jokes that hit Reddit in the hours after the April 27, 2018 summit between Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in1. The most-shared formats include a mock Avengers: Infinity War crossover poster built from the leaders' photo op, a "when bae takes you for a walk" caption slapped over an image of the two men holding hands, and a widely reposted clip of Kim's suited bodyguards jogging alongside his moving limousine23.

The tone runs light and absurd rather than partisan. Instead of policy jokes about the Panmunjom Declaration or denuclearization, the posts treat the historic handshake as a source of shipping gags, MCU parody edits, and buff-guys-running content4.

Origin & Background

Platform
News event (summit) / Reddit (viral spread)
Date
2018

The catalyst event was the inter-Korean summit at Panmunjom on April 27, 2018, where Kim Jong-un became the first North Korean leader to set foot in South Korea since the 1950s and signed the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification of the Korean Peninsula with Moon Jae-in4. The two also agreed to work toward removing nuclear weapons from the peninsula over the following year4.

The meme format started the same day when Redditor NSA-Surveillance posted an Infinity War crossover edit of the summit photo op to r/dankmemes1. About three hours later, user i-var posted a picture of Kim and Moon holding hands captioned "When bae takes you for a walk," which pulled roughly 5,400 points at 98% upvoted inside 24 hours2.

How It Spread

The NSA-Surveillance Infinity War edit climbed past 1,100 points at 96% upvoted in its first day on r/dankmemes, while the i-var "bae" post ran ahead of it with about 5,400 points in the same window12. Both threads pushed the summit imagery to the top of the subreddit within hours of the ceremony.

On r/gifs, a clip of Kim's bodyguards running in formation alongside his limousine hit the front page and pulled around 80,300 points and 3,300 comments inside six hours3. A YouTube upload of the same footage circulated in parallel and became the reference clip most people saw when the guards video was shared off Reddit5.

Coverage by Know Your Meme documented the three main posts as the core of the meme cluster and framed them as the Reddit response to the summit rather than a single template6.

How to Use This Meme

The still images typically work as reaction shots, with users swapping in their own captions over the handshake or the hand-holding photo the way the "when bae takes you for a walk" edit did2. The bodyguards clip is often shared on its own as a running gag whenever a joke calls for a formation of suited men jogging next to a vehicle3.

Frequently Asked Questions