The Pikachu meme was used for the very first time three years ago. According to Know Your Meme, the screencap from "Pokémon" was used as a reaction meme on Tumblr on Sept. 26, 2018. From there, people started reposting it on Facebook and Reddit, among other social sites. Its popularity grew for the rest of 2018, peaking in November of that year before hitting its consistent stride in 2019 and even 2020. According to SlangLang, it became the most used meme of 2018 despite debuting so late in the year.

The story gets a little more interesting, though. Wired explains that a woman named Angela originally posted the meme in 2018, and she told Wired that she took the screenshot in 2017 but didn't use it for an entire year. Wired, though, was curious about this and wondered if the screenshot was a marketing ploy. After all, Pokémon's "Detective Pikachu" film was announced and its first trailer dropped in November 2018, around the same time the meme blew up. However, the meme became popular before the trailer debuted, and the film was kept hush-hush, meaning no random netizens would've known about it.

"I WISH Pokemon hired me as a sleuth marketing coordinator," Angela ultimately told Wired. "That seems like a fun job." For context, Pokémon's animated series has been running consistently since its debut in the mid-'90s, having aired over 1,000 episodes (via Polygon), but the show isn't exactly known for sneaky marketing ploys like this. 

Still, events like this make meme origins especially fun to examine.