Pokepuns

About

Pokepuns are a series of image macros exploring various puns surrounding the character names of the Nintendo anime and video game franchise Pokemon.

Origin

The idea of using Pokemon names as puns has been explored as early as on June 30th, 2007 in a thread posted via 4chan’s /b/ (random) board. In the thread, users photoshopped Pokemon characters into book covers^[5], changing the titles to include its name. Less than three months later, on September 8th, 2007^[2], a Slowpoke thread was derailed by textual puns.

The image macros labeled “Pokepun” did not appear until January 2009 with a picture of Raichu and a caption that read “I’m going to Raichu a love song.” A drawn version was posted by deviantArt user ~its-Will-yo^[3] on January 17th and a photoshopped version was posted via Digg^[4] on January 29th.

It has been also asserted by some fans that the official names of Pokemon monsters were inspired by puns involving their physical traits and characteristics. Prior to the release of Pokemon Black and White in 2011, the NewsBot on the forum Project Pokemon posted a list^[1] of speculated reasoning behind the official names of each monster in the game.

Spread

One of the earliest text-only Pokepun threads outside of 4chan was posted on the Gamespot^[6] forums on May 30th, 2008. By June 24th, 2009, an image macro thread was posted on the Miscellaneous section of the BodyBuilding.com^[7] forums. Over the course of 2009, collections of these image macros appeared on the RWP forums^[8], a single topic Tumblr^[9] and Urban Dictionary.^[10]

In 2010, Pokepun image macros were extensively covered by single topic blogs on MemeBase^[17] and Blogspot^[14], in addition to instances appearing on FunnyJunk^[11], the Escapist^[12] and Smosh.^[13] Currently As of November 2011, there are two active Tumblr tags for these image macros, Pokemon Puns^[15] and Pokepuns.^[16]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search for both “Pokemon Puns” and Pokepuns began in February 2009, a month after the image macros began appearing. They both peaked in December 2009 and December 2010 possibly coinciding with the holiday season and people receiving Pokemon games as presents.

External References