Crying Jordan

It's Michael Jordan's face mid-cry — eyes glassy, mouth pulled down, a single tear going. The whole move is to photoshop that face onto anybody who just lost. A quarterback who threw the game-ending pick gets the Crying Jordan face. A team that got eliminated, a coach who got fired, a fanbase whose season just ended — slap the crying face on them and you're done. No caption required. The face IS the caption.

It lived and died on sports Twitter. Every Sunday during football season your timeline filled up with freshly-pasted Crying Jordans within seconds of anything going wrong. It jumped to politics and general bad news too, but losing was always its home turf. The genius was the source: Jordan is the guy who never loses, so putting his tears on a loser hits twice as hard.

By 2017 it was completely played out. It got posted so relentlessly that posting it became the bad take, and people started dunking on anyone who still used it. You'll still catch one in the wild after a big upset, but it reads as a little dated now — the move of someone who hasn't updated their reaction folder since 2016. Iconic enough that everyone recognizes it, tired enough that nobody's impressed.