The image is a still from Season 1, Episode 3 of the 1991 anime series The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird (Yuusha Shirei Dagwon). The character Katori Yuutarou, an android learning about Earth's nature, points at a yellow butterfly while holding a book and asks, "Is this a pigeon?" - a mistranslation of the original Japanese line about a choucho (butterfly).

The scene circulated on Tumblr as early as 2011 but exploded in May 2018 when Twitter users began replacing the butterfly with other concepts and rewriting the caption. The three-element layout - the confused person, the obvious subject, and the wrong label - became a universal format for satirizing bad takes, corporate buzzwords, and anyone confidently misidentifying something plain to see.