About

"You Have No Power Here!" is a memorable quote from the 2002 epic fantasy film The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers that is often used in online conversations to dismiss someone as having influence or relevance in a particular setting.

Origin

In the film, the line is uttered by King Theoden as he reacts to Gandalf's futile attempt at undoing the mind control spell that had been cast on him (shown below).

On December 5th, 2012, an image macro featuring a screen capture of Theoden was submitted to the captioning site Meme Generator,^[7] which mocked the use of hashtags on sites that do not support them (shown below).

Precursor

While the widespread usage of the phrase "you have no power here!" is attributed to King Theoden's quote in The Lord of the Rings, its earliest appearance in popular films can be found in a scene from the 1939 musical adventure film The Wizard of Oz, wherein Glinda The Good Witch of the North scares away the Wicked Witch of the West.^[1]

“Oh, rubbish! You have no power here. Be gone, before somebody drops a house on you, too.”

Spread

On February 12th, 2013, Redditor INebelung submitted an image macro to the /r/AdviceAnimals^[3] subreddit, which mocked an "unflattering Beyonce" photograph and a picture of President Barack Obama skeet shooting (shown below). Prior to being archived, the post gained over 4,600 up votes and 150 comments.

On March 6th, Redditor Noobsaibot123 submitted a post titled "You have no power here lil bro" to the f7u12^[4] subreddit, which featured a rage comic mocking his younger brother's request to use the computer followed by a King Theoden image macro as the final panel (shown below). Before the post was archived, it gathered upwards of 1,600 up votes and 30 comments.

On March 17th, a Facebook^[2] page titled "You Have No Power Here" was launched. On March 27th, Redditor Quincious submitted an image macro of the United States Supreme Court titled "Your book has no power here" (shown below) to the /r/atheism^[5] subreddit, which accumulated more than 970 up votes and 40 comments prior to being archived.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References