4chan ASCII Triforce Fails

Meme

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Status:

Origin: 4chan

Year: 2008

Added Apr 27, 2009 at 12:12PM EDT by james.

Updated Dec 03, 2021 at 04:31PM EST by Matt.

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Content Warning: The following entry contains explicit material, including racism, homophobia and anti-semitism.

About

4chan ASCII Triforce, also known as "Newfags Can't Triforce", refers to a frequently posed challenge on 4chan for call and response threads. The threads typically feature the original poster challenging 4chan newcomers, referred to as the homophobic epithet "newfags," to create a correctly formatted ASCII Triforce, originating from The Legend Of Zelda video game, also referred to as as a Triforcii. The posters who simply copy and paste the Triforce will fail to post a correctly formatted ASCII Triforce:

Correctly formatted Triforce:
▲
▲ ▲
Incorrectly formatted Triforce:
▲
▲ ▲

Origin

The origin of the meme is unknown. On January 29th, 2009, an anonymous 4chan user posted the earliest mention of the phrase "newfags can't triforce" in the /a/ imageboard. They wrote, "/b/ moves too fast. Even with that time between posts (flood detection) is still moves too fast. Make a new thread, wait 60 seconds, reload, 404. Then only thing you'll see on /b/ are; hook up threads, boxxy threads, newfags can't triforce threads and report threads."^[1]

Anonymous Mon 26 Jan 2009 07:48:35 No.18336368 Report >>18336300 b/ moves too fast. Even with that time between posts (flood detection) is still moves too fast. Make a new thread, wait 60 seconds, reload, 404. Then only thing you'll see on /b/ are; hook up threads, boxxy threads, newfags can't triforce threads and report in threads. That's /b/ b/ should be removed from 4chan and given it's on website text green blue font line diagram product paper software

Spread

A search for "newfags can't triforce" brings up over 1,200 results on fgts.jp^[2], 170 results on Desustorage^[3], and 140 results on 4plebs.^[4] On June 10th, 2014, YouTube user ThatOneStuff posted a video of an angry child getting angry over trying to post the Triforce. The video has since gained over 130 thousand views.

On February 19th, 2014 Reddit user DarkVoid1794 made post to the subreddit /r/4chan entitled "Newfags can't triforce" featuring an image of the antisemitic Happy Merchant meme accompanied by a Star of David made of ASCII triangles.^[5] The post has since gained 516 points (88% upvoted).

black black and white head font design drawing facial hair pattern

How to Triforce

The correct method of posting the ASCII Triforce requires use of non-breaking space characters for various operating systems:

Windows: [alt-255] [alt-255] [alt-30] [enter] [alt 30] [alt 255] [alt 30]

Mac: [option-space] + [option-space] + [option-J] + [enter] + [option-J] + [option-space] + [option-J]

Linux: [Ctrl+Shift+U + a0] [Ctrl+Shift+U + a0] [Ctrl+Shift+U + 25b2] [Enter] [Ctrl+Shift+U + 25b2] [Ctrl+Shift+U + a0] [Ctrl+Shift+U + 25b2]