About

"You Mean the Chaos Emeralds?" is a line from a fanfiction that features President Barack Obama and the MacGuffin from the Sonic the Hedgehog series.

Origin

On March 4th, 2011, Cy-Fox, a member of the Sonic the Hedgehog fansite sonicommunity, posted a story called "Immortality Protocol Cy-Fox: Book 01"^[1] to the site's forums. It features President Obama in discussion with high-ranking (human) officials and politicians, when, seemingly out of nowhere, Obama brings up the Chaos Emeralds.

Spread

On April 30th, 2013, the popular Twitter account "@fanfiction_txt"^[2] tweeted the line after the story was posted on fanfiction.net. As of August 15th, 2016, the tweet has 30,786 retweets and 28,770 likes. The fanfiction.net post has been deleted.

On September 19th, 2013, NeoGAF user Peff commented a thread celebrating strange fanfiction titled "This Yu-Gi-Oh fanfiction has 1.8 million words"^[3] with a screenshot of "Obama chuckled…" line, inspiring a few users to create images putting the President in the Sonic the Hedgehog universe.

On October 23rd, 2013, IGN user ASuchsotheralt posted a thread^[4] devoted to the line.

In 2014, user pleen1930s posted a screenshot of the line to Tumblr,^[5] where in two years it has received 53,277 notes. On April 29th, 2015, Tumblr user anjaroid^[9] uploaded audio of a fake press conference in which Obama reveals he has one of the Chaos Emeralds. That post has received 147,611 notes as of August 15th, 2016. Though the audio on the original post does not work anymore, it was uploaded to Youtube by user "lol no" on May 20th, 2015 (shown below).

A thread devoted to the quote was posted to neoGAF^[6] by user "Squall5042" on June 21st, 2015.

The meme experienced a revival in 2016 when it was applied to Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. On May 14th, 2016, Twitter user @everrrrlong^[10] tweeted a video featuring Sonic the Hedgehog music and Trump surrounded by Chaos Emeralds. It has received 13,253 retweets and 17,471 likes as of August 15th, 2016. The video was posted to Youtube ten days later.

Parodies and Other Fanfictions

On December 28th, 2013, fanfiction.net user GAYLORD666 posted a story parodying fanfiction tropes to the Shrek board called "Shattered Love, Shattered Roses"^[7] that incorporated the line. In late 2015, Redditor AJBalmer posted the quote as a writing prompt to the subreddit /r/writingprompts,^[8] sparking several stories centered around the line. The post received 106 points, 82% upvote before being archived.

Trump's "CHAOS" Tweet

On March 6th, 2018, Donald Trump tweeted in reference to a recent wave of departing staffers, saying:

"The new Fake News narrative is that there is CHAOS in the White House. Wrong! People will always come & go, and I want strong dialogue before making a final decision. I still have some people that I want to change (always seeking perfection). There is no Chaos, only great Energy!"

The tweet reminded some on Twitter of the infamous "You mean the Chaos Emeralds?" fanfiction. Twitter user @hotdiggitydemon posted a comic of Trump inspecting the Chaos Emeralds next to the tweet (shown below). The similarity also led to Select All's^[11] Brian Feldman to write an explainer of the meme and satirically suggest Trump was tweeting about the Chaos Emeralds.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References