Surprised Pikachu Meme

Surprised Pikachu is the open-mouthed Pikachu face people use to mock fake shock at an obvious consequence. On this page you can write your own setup and punchline on the template and save it free, without leaving your browser.

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What does the Surprised Pikachu meme mean?

Surprised Pikachu is about unearned shock. The caption lays out a short chain of events: someone does something with an obvious result, the result happens, and Pikachu's open mouth shows them acting stunned anyway. The humor comes from how predictable it all was. On this template the top text describes the action, often written like a script (“Me: stays up until 3 a.m.”), and the bottom line sets up the reaction (“Also me the next morning:”), leaving Pikachu's face as the punchline.

Where is the Surprised Pikachu meme from?

The image is a frame of Pikachu from the first season of the Pokémon anime, in the episode “Bulbasaur and the Hidden Village.” It sat around as an obscure screenshot until 2018, when it became a reaction format. According to Know Your Meme, the first post to use it this way appeared on Tumblr on September 26, 2018: user popokko paired a short “you do this, this happens” scenario with Pikachu's face, and the post collected more than 200,000 notes. Within days it reached Reddit's r/MemeEconomy, then large Facebook meme pages, and through October 2018 it became a staple on r/me_irl. It has been the standard way to poke fun at predictable outcomes ever since.