We Don't Do That Here

Origin

The line is from Avengers: Infinity War, released on April 27, 2018. When Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) arrives in Wakanda and instinctively bows to its king, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) stops him with a quiet, faintly amused correction:

“We don’t do that here.”

The delivery is the meme. There is no anger and no lecture — just a calm statement that the thing being done is not done, delivered by someone with the authority to say so and no interest in making a scene of it.

What it means / how it’s used

The phrase is used to shut down a social breach without escalating. It is a boundary rather than an argument, and its tone is deliberately unbothered.

Its two registers:

• Genuine — correcting a real etiquette failure, a bad habit in a community, or an unwelcome behaviour, with the calm authority of the original.
• Absurd — applied to something completely trivial, where the ceremonial delivery is the entire joke.

Community moderators, forum regulars, and group chats adopted it heavily, because it does something useful: it establishes a norm without accusing anyone of anything.

How it spread

The meme grew on Tumblr first, which is unusual for a Marvel screenshot. On June 5, 2018, a Tumblr user posted GIFs of the scene, taking 4,200+ notes within six weeks, and a captioned screenshot in late June took a further 4,100+ notes.

It reached Twitter and Reddit in July 2018, where a version on r/dankmemes took 5,500+ points at 96% upvoted within 24 hours. From there it settled into general use as a reaction GIF and image macro.

The Tumblr-first pattern matters. Tumblr’s culture at the time favoured reaction GIFs with emotional nuance over punchline-driven macros, and this scene’s appeal is entirely in its tone — which is why it was picked up there before the joke-first platforms found it.

Notable examples & variations

• The reaction GIF of the full exchange, still the most common form.
• Still-image macros with the line as a caption.
• Community-rule versions used by moderators and group admins.
• Absurd applications to trivial behaviours.
• Edits placing the line over entirely unrelated scenes.

Legacy / cultural impact

The phrase has entered ordinary use as a way of declining something without argument, frequently typed with no image attached and no reference to the film intended.

Chadwick Boseman’s death in August 2020 changed how many of his Black Panther moments circulate, and this one is generally used with warmth. The scene it comes from is brief and easy to miss, but its tone — authority exercised gently — is a large part of why the character resonated, and the meme has kept that specific note in circulation.