You Are Intelligent, I'll Give You That

Origin

The line is from The Witcher, the Netflix adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels. It appears in episode 2, “Four Marks,” which premiered on December 20, 2019.

Geralt of Rivia, played by Henry Cavill, has just finished fighting Torque, a sylvan — a horned, goat-legged creature who has been raiding crops. Torque protests that he is “a rare and intelligent creature,” and Geralt, unimpressed, allows him exactly one point:

“You are intelligent, I’ll give you that.”

The delivery is characteristic Geralt: flat, grudging, and clearly the smallest possible concession the speaker could make.

What it means / how it’s used

The line grants a point while withholding everything else. It concedes that something is clever, and simultaneously makes clear that being clever is not the same as being right, good, or worth agreeing with.

Its uses:

• Acknowledging a clever argument you still reject.
• Complimenting an ingenious but terrible idea.
• Responding to a technically impressive workaround.
• Sarcastically crediting someone for a bad-faith move that worked.

The most common construction is a three-panel format: a setup, an elaborate or ridiculous piece of reasoning, and Geralt’s concession. That structure lets the format present the “clever” thing at length before undercutting it.

How it spread

The show released all eight episodes at once on December 20, 2019, and the meme appeared the following day. On December 21, 2019, a three-panel version posted to a history-meme subreddit took over 11,700 upvotes in four days, and a blank template was posted the same day.

It scaled immediately across communities. A December 22, 2019 version took 31,200+ upvotes in four days, and Facebook fandom pages carried further versions with hundreds of reactions each.

The Witcher’s first season generated an unusual concentration of memes in a very short window — the binge release meant the entire audience finished within days, and formats emerged from across all eight episodes simultaneously rather than sequentially.

Notable examples & variations

• Three-panel versions building to the concession.
• Sarcastic uses crediting a bad-faith argument.
• Fandom versions about in-universe reasoning.
• Text-only quotation as a reply.
• Crops of Geralt’s expression as a standalone unimpressed reaction.

Legacy / cultural impact

The line has settled into use as a compact way of saying that was clever and I still disagree — a distinction online argument frequently needs and rarely makes cleanly.

It also belongs to the broader wave of Witcher memes from December 2019, most of which — including the season’s other enormous export, a certain repeated song about tossing a coin — have since faded. This one survived because, unlike the others, it does not require any knowledge of the show to use.