How The Unfinished Horse Sketch Became A Symbol For Projects Gone Wrong
The internet is a breeding ground for memes that capture universal truths, and few images have resonated as deeply as the Unfinished Horse Sketch.
This simple, half-drawn horse—starting with a beautifully detailed head and devolving into a crude, scribbled mess—has become a viral sensation, symbolizing projects that begin with promise but collapse under pressure or neglect.
From its origins as an art school advertisement to its status as a cultural touchstone for rushed work and declining quality, the Unfinished Horse Sketch has galloped into the collective consciousness.
This article explores its journey, meaning, and enduring relevance, drawing on insights from online communities and meme culture.
1. The Origins of the Unfinished Horse Sketch
The unfinished horse sketch first appeared in 2018, created by artist Ali Bati, as part of an advertising campaign for an art school.
The image depicts a horse rendering that starts out with a well-rendered head full of detail and precision, and becomes less recognizable with each measurement on the body, until you’re left with an unrecognizable scribble in the hindquarters.
Grumpy Sharks has reported that the sketch entered meme territory when it was shared on Reddit, titled “When there is 5 minutes remaining on the test,” based on the idea of the relatable experience of an awful rush to finish something in a time constraint that resonated with people and gained significant traction.
The early distribution of the sketch was aided by social media platforms, including Reddit and Twitter, that offered users an enormous playing field for attaching the rendering to test scenarios and beyond.
Essentially, the rendering became a way to visually represent any situation where dedicated interest gives way to a careless process during the final stretch.
For example, a Reddit post from 2018 helped give the sketch even more momentum and received thousands of upvotes because users shared the universal experience of starting with strict detail but ultimately finishing subsequently.
2. Evolution into a Meme
As the Unfinished Horse Sketch continued to circulate, its adaptability became evident. By 2019, it was no longer limited to exams: people surfaced it in posts on Tumblr for all kinds of creative works, professional work, and even personal projects.
One such occasion was a Tumblr post that used the sketch to describe the quality drop of the TV series Sherlock.
The highly detailed head of the horse represented the early seasons of the critically-acclaimed TV series, while the slapdash hindquarters mocked its later episodes, which were unsatisfactory for fans.
The adaptable nature of the meme made it easier to share on most online communities. It was reposted in subreddits like /r/funny and /r/memes, where people made variations that ranged from laughing at rushed schoolbooks to poorly made sequels to video games.
Because of the high contrast between detailed artistry and chaotic squiggles, the image is a swift way to metaphorically describe an entire project that loses steam midway through development.
The beauty of the image is how simple it is to relate to the horse for a quote-unquote “person”, and that “person” can literally be anyone ranging from a student or a professional, to a creator.
3. The Flaming Horse Rating Variant
In 2022, the Unfinished Horse Sketch morphed into a different variation called the Flaming Horse Rating.
This alternate format based its theory from the original concept with regards to dividing the horse up into different pieces to rate the overall quality of TV shows, movies, or even video games over time.
An example would be if a Redditor posted the horse separating useful aspects from bad aspects when a show has been around for multiple seasons.
The horse’s head may get a detailed rating for being flawless for the given show’s first season, while the tail would get language implying that the final seasons were absolute trash (scribbled tail).
The Flaming Horse Rating became widely used because it offered a visual representation for critique for longform media projects. One popular usage was to represent Netflix’s Daredevil as detailed front of horse and the crudely drawn back for the third season- which some felt to be strained or worse than the previous two seasons.
The posts shared on Twitter showcased the Flaming Horse Rating to evaluate games like Marvel’s Spider-Man or The Last of Us where the horse deteriorated with poor narrative details or game play drops in quality.
Seamlessly, the posts made a statement to fans that have been through the frustrations of inconsistent quality of their favorite franchises across various media forums.
4. Symbolism and Cultural Impact
The sustained charm of the Unfinished Horse Sketch is its symbolism. The image tells a universal truth that many projects are conceived with great intentions but fall apart on the small details due to time, energy, or priorities.
The detailed head illustrates the enthusiasm and care of the project’s early stages-whether it’s a paper from a student, an app from a developer, or a new TV pilot season.
The squiggly back of the horse illustrates the reality of deadlines, time constraints, and creative exhaustion. As captured in a Medium article, memes like this are straightforward, simply expressed representations of all the complexities of life that we share in our social media feeds.
The meme is a reflection of the expectations we place on ourselves as a society and our obligation to always be producing.
The Unfinished Horse Sketch illustrates the compromises we make to finish work on time. It is no coincidence that the Unfinished Horse Sketch started circulating on r/freefolk (the subreddit created for Game of Thrones fans) where users critiqued versus largely celebrated the show, and the horse became a handy reference for their disappointment with the final season.
The detailed front of the horse referred to the original brilliance and thought-to-surprising, and the squiggly back suggested a rushed and untidy conclusion.
5. Examples of Usage in Popular Culture
The Unfinished Horse Sketch has taken on a life of its own beyond the context it was initially intended to be viewed in. Brands have used it in marketing to lightheartedly poke fun at themselves, often illustrating how they themselves haven’t gotten everything “right” either.
A tech startup might share it on Twitter as a humorous acknowledgement of why they had to rush a buggy software release, with the detailed horse head signifying all the great features they planned to ship, and the scribbles at the back happy for the first launch of a half-completed horse.
And then, fans have continued to creatively remix the meme into thousands of different reconceptualizations, where a wide majority are actively critiquing some of the media they saw.
An internet classic post shared and circulated on Reddit is the meme used to playfully critique the Star Wars sequels, where the front half of the horse represents the original trilogy of films, but the back half represents the newer films which were more troublesome for fans to enjoy.
Much of the meme has also remained sustained because of active online communities. For example, subreddits like r/memes or r/funny consistently have users remixing and sharing their new iterations of the original work.
Twitter users are especially agile, with entire threads on how the horse can be applied to everything from commercial music album releases to political campaigns. The form is universally relatable and has taken on a life of its own well-beyond its original niche, a staple of memes as a fun form of internet culture.
6. Why It Endures
The Unfinished Horse Sketch has lived on, because we can all relate to it; and it’s broad enough to apply to many different things, and it makes a strong visual impact.
We have all been in that space of feeling clean about a project, only to start to stumble; whether it’s a student preparing for their exam at the last minute, a writer pushing through to get a deadline met, or studios (surely) taking a beloved established franchise and somehow get it wrong; this horse expresses this drop off with painful authenticity.
That is also a big shareable quality – it is so adaptable to so many forms, from personal stories to global phenomenon.
Aligning with it’s adaptability, the Unfinished Horse Sketch carries another added feature, visual simplicity. Rather than text-heavy memes, the beauty of the Horse is that it communicates its message at once.
There will be added forms, yet Forbes recently went on to note that memes with strong visual images connect better to going viral. Because it is easy to connect to, and share.
The Unfinished Horse Sketch does not need explanation, its meaning is clear at a glance, and this is perfect for social media, such as Twitter and Reddit, that has a relatively short span of attention.
7. Conclusion
Transforming from an unassuming art school flyer to a genuine cultural icon, the Unfinished Horse Sketch will endure throughout internet history.
Its history—from a reddit post regarding the irregularities of taking a test to a universally understood charge for projects that just did not work out—illustrates how different communities can communicate experiences collectively through memes.
The horse sketch can explain the decline in the quality of a television show, convey the difficulty of an assignment presented under pressure, or express moments of creative burnout, and yet, it explodes with power in its honesty.
No matter how meaningful the term was intended to be, it would become exceptionally clear by the time you reflect, you may have gotten caught up in haste.
While internet culture continues to evolve, the Unfinished Horse Sketch offers a quick and straight-forward representation of the demands of product quality and management.
It’s a whimsical yet bittersweet representation of our often-irregular own stains. Enjoy this cartoon and remember that you have always found our way towards better, iteratively, and while laughing at failures along the way.
The next time you have the horse presented to you appeared in your feed, try to embrace its hilarity, and check if the retrospective on your own projects outlines scribbles.
