Shocked Turtle / HUH

About

Shocked Turtle is a reaction image of the turtle character Verne from the Over the Hedge video game appearing shocked and confused. Starting in 2020, the image gained popularity on Twitter and other social media, and in 2022, the Twitch emote HUH based on the image was popularized by Canadian streamer xQc.

Origin

In 2006, the video game Over the Hedge, based on the comic strip and an animated film of the same name, was released. In mission four of the game titled "Caught in the Hedge," the main group of characters encounters a bear, with the turtle Verne briefly appearing confused and shocked (video^[3] shown below, 00:39 mark).

The still image of Verne appearing shocked has appeared in the game's image galleries on various gaming websites, including Jeuxvideo (shown below).^[6]

Spread

The image has been used as a reaction to express shock at least since mid-2020. On July 11th, 2020, Twitter^[7] user @jajaxdxd made the earliest found use of the image as a reaction, although prior instances are likely to exist (shown below).

The image maintained its popularity as a reaction and a caption format through the following years. For example, on August 31st, 2021, Redditor SpeedingEmu posted an image macro meme that received over 3,000 upvotes in /r/shitposting^[8] in two years (shown below, left). On March 20th, 2022, Twitter^[8] user @JordiWild shared a post using the image that gained over 3,400 retweets and 62,000 likes in one year (shown below, right).

HUH (Twitch Emote)

The emote was added to the site 7TV on September 15th, 2021, by the user PentalexLive^[1] and then later FrankerFacez by the user hyruverse^[2] on September 20th, 2021, with a photo set included of both light and dark mode Twitch chat options. The emote went on to be used in over 4,000 Twitch channels within a year of being uploaded (shown below).

After being created in late 2021, the emote received basic usage in many Twitch chats as a way to express confusion at what was happening on stream, often during a game or when a Twitch streamer was saying something out of pocket in a story to the chat. This usage began to change after it was included in xQc's Twitch chat, which happened on March 31st, 2022, with it replacing the uncommonly used VaN emote — as reported by the Twitter account @xQcUpdates,^[4] with this development getting over 1,200 likes in five months (shown below).

The emote almost immediately started to make an impact on the chat, with people donating outlandish things for the text-to-speech function to read out, causing the chat to spam the emote as a response. The emote became so ingrained into xQc's chat that the YouTuber xQcClips^[5] uploaded a video about the history of the emote to YouTube on August 2nd, 2022 (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References