About

You Cannot Kill Me In A Way That Matters is a phrase from a 2018 Tumblr shitpost story about mushrooms. It has since become part of Tumblr culture and spawned fan art, dramatic readings, merchandise and music.

Origin

Around June 15th, 2018, Tumblr user personsonable posted a three-paragraph story about a person asking a mushroom for the name of God under gunpoint, to which the mushroom replies by taunting its supremacy, terrifying and enraging the person.

me holding a gun to a mushroom: tell me the name of god you fungal piece of shit

mushroom: can you feel your heart burning? can you feel the struggle within? the fear within me is beyond anything your soul can make. you cannot kill me in a way that matters

me cocking the gun, tears streaming down my face: I’M NOT FUCKING SCARED OF YOU

In a series of replies that often accompanies screenshots of the post, personsonable explains that meaning behind the story:

miaislying: Hey OP? What the FUCK does this mean?

personsonable: decay exists as an extant form of life

miaislying: That’s a terrifying answer, have a nice day

The post gained over 116,000 notes in two weeks, but was deleted around 2019 and only indirectly archived.^[1]

Spread

A screenshot of the conversation was posted by Tumblr user stabsinthe on December 24th, 2018, gaining a further 157,000 notes.^[2]

Screenshots were also posted across Reddit^[3][4][5] and Twitter^[6] over the following years, all gaining thousands of points. The story spawned many instances of fanart and comic dramatizations; for example, a post by miamitu^[9] gained over 184,000 notes.

Several dramatic readings of the story have been performed and posted on Tumblr, YouTube and TikTok. The below examples were posted on August 19th, 2020, and February 9th, 2021, gaining 68,000 likes and 89,200 likes respectively.^[7][8]

The phrase "You cannot kill me in a way that matters" also inspired music, with at least two songs carrying the phrase in its title. They were released on March 17, 2019, and February 5th, 2021, respectively (shown below).

Shroomjak Variation

After the mushroom-themed meme Shroomjak emerged in 2021, the phrase resurfaced and began being paired with the character. For example a post in /r/196^[10] on June 30th, 2021 by thecatofnumbers gained over 5,300 points (shown below, left). Another was posted on 4chan on July 5th^[11] (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search interest

External References