Daily Debate: What Is the Best Meme Phrase in the Zelda Series?

Posted on May 21 2024 by Kora Burton

When sticker and fan merch websites like Redbubble first became popular, you could tell a person’s favorite memes and jokes just by looking at their water bottle. It was easy to find even niche references to slap onto your belongings on the cheap, back when the marketplace for these things was wild and free. In college, my laptop was covered in Undertale scenes and various stand-up one-liners about being an English major. As many fan artists and sticker lovers know, however, copyright takedowns have made the fan market for meme-wielding somewhat more limited to whatever is currently corporately approved (which tends to be pretty tame and boring), or at least whatever is flying under the radar at the moment until it’s noticed — and, frustratingly, it’s often the more flagrant intellectual property offenders copying and pasting designs that tend to pass unnoticed, while fan artists who put in the time and passion to make something new and interesting get shut down. You can still of course find stickers and other wearables on Etsy and other fan shops; it’s just a different landscape than it once was.

All this is to say, if this still were the era when I regularly ordered stacks of stickers carefully curated to represent my style and humor, I would have gotten something representing Tears of the Kingdom‘s repeating line-turned-meme: “Demon King? Secret stone?” It’s just funny, not only because it points to an issue many fans have with the game — i.e., how blandly some of the main story elements repeat across regions in the name of being free to do the regions in any order, without theoretically affecting the way the narrative plays out — but because it capitalizes on the fact that this blandness makes you think each of the Sages actually say this phrase in the same exact way, at least in the English version of the game. But, strictly speaking, they don’t. Tulin and Riju do say the line as presented above verbatim, while Yunobo oh-so-creatively reverses it (“Secret stone? Demon King?”). Sidon says something slightly different, which seems at least to be marginally more interactive with the ancestor he’s speaking to: “That stone that you are wearing?” Realizing this, it makes me wish that each conversation had been tailored to the individual Sage, flowing around their personality and the potential dynamic with their respective ancestor… but effectively, even if not in strict truth, each character parrots the same line, and each ancestor narrates the same thing, and so the meme is born, from frustration, boredom, and eventually an acceptance that this is what we were given.

As far as other phrases in the Zelda series and beyond that are shareable and wearable, the most famous is probably the Old Man’s classic line from the original: “IT’S DANGEROUS TO GO ALONE!” This is perhaps followed closely by the Secret Moblin’s cryptic line, “IT’S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY.” From hanging out with other Zelda Dungeon team members, I get the feeling we’re also pretty partial to “YOU KNOW BAGU?”, spoken by the River Man in The Adventure of Link. And then, there’s probably any spoken line of dialogue whatsoever from the CD-i games, if you want to count them.

But what about you? What Zelda phrase or gaffe do you think is the most memeable? Which moments in the Zelda series have you laughed at and embraced (or even worn)? Let us know in the comments down below!