About

I'm a Healer, But… is a quote from the anime After War Gundam X, said by a doctor as he picks up a gun. This scene and the associated line were used by online artists as an exploitable template for redraws and photoshops, mainly depicting fictional doctors and support characters.

Origin

On August 23rd, 1996, episode 21 of After War Gundam X, “Like My Dead Wife Used to Say”, premiered. In this episode, doctor Techcs Farzenberg picks up a handgun from a drawer after learning of an imminent enemy raid.

The earliest recorded use of this scene as a meme, as a screenshot displaying the translated quote in its current popular form, dates from April 14th, 2017; it was posted on the Twitter account Overwatch Cavalry,^[1] and evocates the support character Mercy in a 1vs6 situation. The watermark indicated that the meme was created by an account known as mysticalhanzo, though it is unclear if the account still exists. While this tweet did not get much popularity, only gaining 133 likes and 81 retweets in over 5 years, it inspired Tumblr artist Lazymile to make and post a redraw of this scene^[2] on April 24th, which gained more than 30,000 notes before it was deleted from the site.

Spread

Over the following years, the scene was applied to numerous characters by artists on social media. For example, on August 19th, 2020, iFunny^[3] user Motive used the template to make a joke about American health insurance (shown below, left). On November 19th, 2019, DeviantArt user spicyramennoodles^[4] posted a Plants vs. Zombies edit of the meme (shown below, right).

Some users only used the text of the meme and applied it to more elaborate scenarios. For example, on August 6th, 2021, iFunny^[5] user jdm96 applied it to a character from Eden's Zero (shown below, left). A GIF from Dorohedoro with the phrase has been uploaded to Tenor (shown below, right).

Various Examples

External Sources