I will confess I had never once thought about the Discord Wumpus, the little purple space creature with a leaf on its head, until this week, when I watched thousands of strangers draw it getting fed to an orca. That’s where we are now. Discord turned on age verification for everyone, the rollout came with bugs, and the company responded with a crying Wumpus giving a thumbs up.
So what does the meme mean? It’s a protest. On September 23, Discord joked about “an extremely popular age assurance update” having bugs, and users who had just been locked out of their own servers did not find it cute. As Kotaku’s report on Discord’s second attempt at age verification lays out, the company already backed off a February version after a huge backlash, so nobody had patience left.
The sarcasm landed on people like a 26-year-old user, one week from turning 27, who was told they were not old enough for an age-restricted channel. The top reply to Discord simply quoted the phrase back and asked if they were serious, and it pulled more than 100,000 likes
Why Is Everyone Mad at a Cartoon?
Because the cartoon is doing PR for an ID check. The complaint that keeps coming up is that companies keep trying to act like one of the guys, and users do not want a relatable mascot, they want their servers back. One artist accused Discord of trying to quirk chungus a data harvesting scheme, a phrase I plan to use at my next family dinner.
Even the people enjoying the trend are nervous about it. One of the most shared takes said the Wumpus torture trend is hilarious but will be ruined the second Discord tries to join in, and somebody dug up a Nintendo DS PictoChat screen from February, the first time everyone swore they were leaving for good.
We’re All Killing Wumpus Now?
Then the artists showed up, and I have never seen a group of people so happy to share an enemy. It started mild, with Wumpus crammed into a blender, and one person took the “it has bugs” line extremely literally, cockroaches included. Then someone put him in a Saw-style trap, and the whole thing stopped being a complaint and turned into a competition.
How Far Can a Discord Wumpus Meme Go?
Pretty far, it turns out. Wumpus has been pulled apart by horses in a moody oil painting, stared down by a giant orca under the caption “eliminate him,” and skewered by a one-winged swordsman who tells him, “I will never be a memory, Wumpus.” As a responsible adult, I should find this upsetting. As a responsible adult who has been asked to scan my face for a chat app, I find it healing.
The Jurassic Park version might be the winner, mostly because Jeff Goldblum saying “Life, uh, finds a way” makes a pack of dinosaurs eating a mascot feel like a nature documentary. My favorite reaction is still the idea of Discord’s social media manager logging on to all of this, staring into the middle distance like a man in a black-and-white portrait.
Discord says it has already fixed some of the bugs, and the art keeps coming anyway, because this stopped being about bugs a while ago. So here is my question for you: if your favorite app made you prove your age tomorrow, would you hand over the ID, or would you start drawing its mascot getting eaten by a dinosaur?
If you are rebuilding your online social life somewhere else, 38 Gaming Memes For People With 400 Unfinished Games is good company for the move. And 30 Funny Comments That Prove The Real Joke Is Always In The Replies explains this whole saga better than I can, since the quote posts were always going to beat the original.
Jake Parker spends most of his time on memes, group chats and apps that keep asking him to prove he is an adult, which he is, technically.
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Jake Parker, known around the web as "Jay," is a digital writer with over 10 years of experience covering internet humor, meme trends, and viral content. Before joining Thunder Dungeon, Jay was the lead editor at MemeWire, where he helped curate memes that broke the internet, including coverage on trends like Distracted Boyfriend, Kombucha Girl, and Bernie Sanders’ Mittens. A self-proclaimed "professional procrastinator," Jay spends his downtime scrolling Reddit and Twitter to stay ahead of what's about to break the internet next.
