Incomprehensible, May God Have Mercy on Your Wretched Soul

About

Incomprehensible, May God Have Mercy on Your Wretched Soul and Incomprehensible, I've Met With a Terrible Fate refers to a catchphrase often used in memes and reaction images that expresses inability or refusal to comprehend what has just been said or done, not unlike, Jesse, What Are You Talking About meme, and often reference Lovecraftian horror. The catchphrases are a development of the Understandable, Have a Nice Day format and has been used online since 2017.

Origin

On June 6th, 2017, Tumblr^[1] user potionem posted a three panel version of Understandable, Have a Nice Day meme about a person encountering cosmic horror, with the punchline recaptioned "Incomprehensible. I've met with a terrible fate." The post received over 35,000 likes and reblogs in six years (original meme shown below, left; edit shown below, right).

Spread

On the same day, Tumblr user maddogofshimano posted the earliest known derivative meme based on the format, a meme about E3 2017 that has since been deleted (shown below, left).^[2]

Prior to June 4th, 2018, an unknown user posted a the bottom panel of Understandable, Have a Nice Day meme format captioned, "Incomprehensible, may God have mercy on your wretched soul" (shown below, right). The earliest discovered repost of the image was made by Tumblr^[3] user vapidshallowslut on April 15th, 2019.

The reaction image achieved widespread popularity in the following years. For example, on June 15th, 2021, iFunny^[4] user Nail reposted it, with the post garnering over 270 smiles on the app. On June 4th, 2018, Tumblr^[5] user entykk posted a Joshua Graham redraw of the image that gained over 780 reblogs and 1,700 likes in five years (shown below, left). On September 26th, 2020, Facebook^[6] page Voidposting posted a void version of Hello, Human Resources?! meme that used the catchphrase as a punchline. The post (shown below, right) received over 770 reactions and 2,000 shares in three years.

The catchphrases saw continued use online in the early 2020s, both independently and as a part of reaction images and memes.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References