Cuphead Flower / Cagney Carnation

About

Cuphead Flower, also known as Floral Fury or Cagney Carnation, is an exploitable image macro series depicting a cartoon flower from the 2017 video game Cuphead smiling innocently and then screaming angrily with its tongue out. It’s typically used as a meme format for showing conflicting reactions where the subject of the caption is outraged or angry when someone else does something, but then cute or innocent when applied to them in the same situation.

Origin

The images used in the meme format are pulled from the run-and-gun video game Cuphead, which released on September 29th, 2017, specifically the level called “Floral Fury.” In this boss fight (featured below), the player challenges Cagney Carnation, a large sentient flower known for catching enemies off guard with its seemingly harmless appearance. When approached, Cagney first innocently smiles at the player before suddenly yelling and maniacally grinning, mimicking the meme’s format.

Spread

Mimicking the layout of Drakeposting, the standard Cuphead Flower format first appeared online in late 2019. One of the earliest examples of this comes from Redditor^[1] EatYourReddit who posted a meme to the r/memes sub on November 11th, 2019. The post (shown below) received over 11,500 upvotes and 89 comments.

On November 12th, 2019, Redditor^[2] daddy_pope posted their take on the meme to the r/me_irl subreddit depicting users reacting to content from other social media platforms. This post (seen below) was upvoted over 78,000 times, commented on 361 times and also gifted a few Reddit awards.

On November 26th, 2019, Redditor^[3] DogeEmperor105 uploaded a meme (shown below) to the r/dankmemes sub under the title, “It do be like that,” receiving over 21,400 upvotes and 54 comments.

The format also appeared on Imgur,^[4] seen in an upload from user DonRanchero on January 15th, 2020. The image (seen below) received 4,171 points, 92,302 views and 134 comments.

Redditor^[5] cornyapple posted another version of the meme to r/harrypotter on March 2nd, 2020. The post (seen below) received over 1,100 upvotes and 13 comments.

Various examples of the Cuphead Flower meme can also be found on Twitter. One such example was used in a reply by Twitter^[6] user DavidAgStone on April 9th, 2020, which was liked 345 times and retweeted another 28 times (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References