About

Woody Holding Sora Back is an exploitable image macro meme depicting Toy Story's Woody in Square Enix's video game Kingdom Hearts III holding up his hand to tell Sora to hold back, which was celebrated and parodied by fans of the series. The original scene where Woody stands up to and insults the series villain Xehanort has also been used in various video memes.

Origin

In Kingdom Hearts III, released January 25th, 2019, Sora, Donald Duck and Goofy venture into the cinematic universe of Toy Story, which is besieged by Heartless. Over the course of the level, the trio enlists the aid of the main characters of Toy Story, including Woody. This leads to a climactic showdown with a young version of Xehanort. As Xehanort challenges the heroes with his philosophy, Woody steps up and insults him, saying lines like "Yeah, I am a toy… and a friend. My guess is that no one's ever loved you before because you know nothing about hearts and love," and, "You're hollower than any toy" (shown below).

Spread

The moment was quickly celebrated and parodied by Kingdom Hearts fans. In a Let's Play of the game posted February 18th, 2019, Alpharad parodied the scene by adding Jojo's Bizarre Adventure effects and music to the moment (shown below, left). On March 2nd, 2019, YouTuber RoaringChaos spliced the scene with Supa Hot Fire, gaining over 16,000 views (shown below, right).

In particular, the still image of Woody confidently pushing Sora aside to confront Xehanort was parodied by fans of the series. For example, on February 9th, 2019, Twitter user @frostmacht^[1] tweeted a Jojo's Bizarre Adventure parody, mashing it with the Oh, You're Approaching Me? meme (shown below, left). On February 8th, Twitter user @superkevin64^[2] posted a similar meme referencing Dragon Ball, gaining over 4,900 retweets and 17,000 likes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References