Say Sike Right Now

Origin

The phrase and the picture arrived from different places and fused into one meme.

“Sike” (also spelled psych) is decades-old slang for just kidding — you say something, then reveal it was a joke. “Say sike right now” inverts it into a plea: the speaker is begging the other person to admit they were joking, because the alternative is unbearable. The construction circulated in online speech well before it had a face.

The face is a screenshot from Super Mario Maker 2 (Nintendo, 2019) — a blue Piranha Creeper, a stalk-necked plant enemy whose wide-eyed, slightly stricken expression reads as pure distress. Twitter user @Joel_Masada posted the image to a Discord server on April 29, 2019, and later confirmed authorship publicly on July 18, 2019, noting the image had spread so far it had earned its own Know Your Meme entry.

What it means / how it’s used

It is a reaction to news so bad, so absurd, or so disappointing that the only acceptable response is denial. The poster is not arguing — they are asking for a retraction.

Typical uses:

• Reacting to a genuinely unwelcome announcement (a cancellation, a price rise, a plot twist).
• Responding to someone confessing an opinion the poster finds indefensible.
• Reacting to a screenshot of something outrageous with the plant’s stricken face attached.

The plant does a lot of work here. It is not angry, it is pleading — which makes the format comic rather than hostile, and lets it be used for genuinely trivial complaints without seeming aggressive.

How it spread

The image circulated on Twitter the same day it was made: a April 29, 2019 post picked up over 490 likes and 200 retweets. The real explosion came in July. On July 10, 2019, a Twitter user paired the plant with a “time traveler conversation” bit — a format where someone from the future reveals something awful about the present — and the post took 55,000+ likes and 16,000+ retweets in under a week.

Reddit amplified it the same day: a post to r/memes took 24,000+ points, and by July 14, 2019 another to r/dankmemes had 34,000+ points. Through the rest of 2019 the plant became a standard reply image, and the phrase — which had existed independently — became permanently attached to it.

Notable examples & variations

• “Time traveler” conversations ending with the plant demanding a retraction.
• Reaction replies to bad news screenshots, with no caption beyond the image.
• Edits that stack multiple plants for escalating disbelief.
• Versions swapping the plant for other distressed video-game faces while keeping the phrase.
• Text-only uses of “say sike right now,” which remain common in replies without any image at all.

Legacy / cultural impact

Say Sike Right Now is a good illustration of how a phrase and an image can bind together after the fact. Neither element needed the other, but once paired, the combination became far more portable than either alone — the plant gave the phrase a face, and the phrase gave a minor enemy from a Mario level a permanent second career.

The format remains in steady use as a disbelief reaction across Twitter/X, Reddit, and Discord, and it belongs to a wider family of Super Mario Maker 2 and Nintendo screenshots that became reaction images in 2019. Its endurance is helped by the fact that the underlying sentiment — please tell me you are joking — never goes out of date.