About

I Don't Know… That's Scary… is a panel from Gag Manga Biyori, a manga known for its nonsensical and non-sequitur joke style. The panel comes from a page titled, "True Power," in which a student can be seen flexing while surrounded by a mysterious aura, asking his teacher, " I can feel the power overflowing! Master! What is this?" only for the master to say, "That's scary… I don't know." The exploitable meme has become a way for people to joke about people in positions of authority being clueless during crucial moments.

Origin

The original comic is sourced from a page in Kosuke Masuda's Gag Mang Biyori. The page shows a student screaming and flexing his power while asking his teacher to explain what's going on. Instead, the teacher says with a worried expression, "I don't know… That's scary" (seen below, left). According to TinEye, the earliest known post of the panel was in Korean on the South Korean blog site "Egloos."^[1]

The earliest known repost of this page online is a February 16th, 2013, post by Tumblr^[2] user @koukiboy, who gathered over 140,000 notes in 10 years (seen below, right).

Spread

On September 6th, 2019, Tumblr user @maamlet^[3] used the last panel of the aforementioned meme to reply to another Tumblr user, with the thread gathering over 100,000 notes in five years.

On January 11th, 2021, Tumblr^[4] user @yandere-angela posted the panel as a reaction meme as well, gathering over 50,000 notes in three years (seen below, left). On February 5th, 2022, Tumblr user @tsunflowers posted the image as well, gathering over 13,000 notes on a post in two years (seen below, right).

On February 24th, 2023, Tumblr^[5] user @sexhaver posted the image to match an anecdote about their doctor, gathering over 42,000 notes in a year (seen below, left). On June 14th, 2024, X^[6] user @IzzzyzzzArt posted the panel alongside a post that read, "people who’s intrusive thoughts are ‘what if I dyed my hair’ when u tell them about ur intrusive thoughts," gathering over 70,000 likes in three days (seen below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References