Surprised Pikachu

Surprised Pikachu is a reaction image used when someone behaves as if a consequence was impossible even though it was plainly foreseeable. The familiar wide eyes and open mouth come from Pikachu in the Pokémon anime episode “Bulbasaur and the Hidden Village,” first broadcast in Japan in 1997.

The screenshot itself predates the meme by decades. Its documented meme use appeared on Tumblr on September 26, 2018, where it fit a joke about causing a known problem and then reacting with surprise.

The format travels easily because the setup can be written in a sentence: a person, company, or fictional character makes a choice; the expected outcome follows; Pikachu supplies the mock astonishment. It works as a reaction image, a final panel, or a captionless reply.

Once it moved from Tumblr into Reddit, Twitter and image-macro feeds, the exact screenshot became more important than any single caption. That fixed expression lets the joke stay recognizable while the target changes.

The face is simple enough to read at phone size, while the joke reverses the normal meaning of surprise: the viewer is invited to say that nobody should be surprised.