About

Free Him is a phrase used often in response to people or creatures who seem trapped, literally or figuratively. It is often associated with an image of a Pikachu (a creature from the Pokémon series) bouncy ball.

Origin

According to Tumblr Trends,^[1] it started with a post by the now-defunct^[2] Tumblr blog transboyscout, containing a picture of a Pikachu bouncy ball with the caption "free him". However, no reblogs of the original image were able to be found.

Spread

On August 13th, 2014, Tumblr user nathanael-platier reblogged an image set, originally posted by user thanael, that implies the Pikachu was released from the ball, causing many human-sized Pikachus to arrive, with the caption "We freed them… but at what cost?". While the original image set and the reblog have been removed, surviving reblogs indicate that they obtained an upwards of 1,000,000 notes in roughly 2 years.^[5]

On July 13th, 2014, Tumblr user 1ggyness posted an image of the Pikachu ball in the Dashcon ballpit (below), referencing An Extra Hour in the Ball Pit.^[3] It obtained 43,511 notes in about 2 years.

On October 19th, 2014, Imgur user TownsendV228 uploaded the image set created by thanael to Imgur,^[6] along with a screenshot of a caption added to it saying:

that ball wasn't there to trap them
it was there to protect us

In about 2 years, it received roughly 9,750 points (98% upvoted), an upwards of 4,000 favorites, more than 200 comments, and over 490,000 views.

On August 22nd, 2015, "free him", a single-serving Tumblr blog dedicated to the meme, made its first post, which was an image of the Pikachu bouncy ball with the caption and tag "free him".^[4] It obtained 4 notes in about 8 months. It has continued to make posts consistently as of April 22nd, 2016.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References