Surprised Pikachu

Examples

Installs over 1000 Cyberpunk 2077 mods; crashes immediately — surprised pikachu captioned variant.

Installs over 1000 Cyberpunk 2077 mods; crashes immediately

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Credit & details

Installs over 1000 Cyberpunk 2077 mods; crashes immediately

documented by Know Your Meme.

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Have to crack a few eggs; one egg must be cracked — surprised pikachu captioned variant.

Have to crack a few eggs; one egg must be cracked

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Credit & details

Have to crack a few eggs; one egg must be cracked

documented by Know Your Meme.

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Posting an upvote meme; account banned — surprised pikachu captioned variant.

Posting an upvote meme; account banned

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Credit & details

Posting an upvote meme; account banned

documented by Know Your Meme.

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Intentionally blurred surprised Pikachu below “Me: *spends 8 hours per day on internet* / Eyesight: *gets worse* / me:”.

The eyesight gets worse

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Credit & details

The deliberately blurred entire meme makes the predictable eyesight punchline part of its visual form.

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“me: hmm what happens if i forcibly bend this thing / thing: *breaks* / me:” followed by surprised Pikachu.

A hands-on experiment in the obvious

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Credit & details

The narrator asks a question, performs the test and gets the most foreseeable answer imaginable. Pikachu turns that answer into an affront. Know Your Meme attributes the underlying September 2018 post to Tumblr user popokko.

Underlying post attributed to popokko by Know Your Meme; Underlying animation: Pokémon.

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“Me: Installs 500 Skyrim mods / Skyrim: Crashes immediately / Me:” followed by surprised Pikachu.

Five hundred tiny changes. What could go wrong?

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Credit & details

The caption skips all five hundred installation decisions and lands on the innocent-looking face afterward. The joke is the player’s selective surprise, not a claim that every mod breaks a game.

Underlying animation: Pokémon.

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“me: I don’t need to write that down, I’ll remember it / also me: *forgets it*” above surprised Pikachu.

The note you are absolutely certain you do not need

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Credit & details

An overconfident promise is disproved before the image even arrives. The face makes the familiar failure feel like a fresh betrayal by your own brain.

Underlying animation: Pokémon.

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About & sources

Pikachu's open-mouthed surprise punctuates a story whose outcome should have been obvious.

Date

The screenshot comes from Pokémon's Bulbasaur and the Hidden Village episode. Know Your Meme identifies a September 26, 2018 Tumblr post by popokko as the first documented reaction use in its account, followed by Reddit and Facebook spread.

History

The joke is usually not surprise alone, but surprise after an entirely predictable consequence. An older television frame gained a new narrative function through captions in autumn 2018.

Know Your Meme — Surprised Pikachu
Catalog image
Surprised Pikachu representative image