Tiramisu Cake

Origin

The "Tiramisu Cake" meme was assembled from three pieces that had nothing to do with each other: a Korean indie song, the choreography of a Chinese pop hit, and a 3D avatar of a Japanese manga character.

The song is "Tiramisu Cake" by the Korean indie band We Are The Night, from their 2015 mini album. In 2018 actor Kim Sung-chul recorded a version for the OST of the KBS2 drama "To. Jenny," and when Kim rose in popularity through "Our Beloved Summer" in 2022, the song was rediscovered and spread by word of mouth on social media (Genie Music listing).

The dance comes from the 2014 choreography of "Little Apple" (小苹果) by the Chinese duo Chopstick Brothers. The moves became popular in the MMD (MikuMikuDance) community and circulated as GIFs. In 2021, YouTuber SwaggyCucumber was posting a series built on VRChat avatars of Hunter × Hunter characters, and a user put that choreography on the Gon Freecss avatar set to "Like a G6." That clip became a meme abroad first, under the name "Gon Dancing."

Spread

The three pieces converged on May 28, 2024, when the TikTok user "터헌터헌" took the Gon Dancing MMD and swapped its backing track for "Tiramisu Cake." The Korean wave started there and, through June 2024, spread across TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts.

It spread fast because the absurdity of the combination was itself the joke. There is a wide temperature gap between the sweet, gentle chorus of an indie ballad and a shonen manga protagonist repeating a simple dance with a blank face. Listeners who knew the song heard it made strange; viewers who knew Gon saw the character made strange. That double mismatch rewarded rewatching.

The most widespread spinoff is a pun on the title. Korean speakers rewrite "Tiramisu Cake" (tiramisu keik) as "T-ra misukhae" — roughly "I'm bad at this because I'm a T" in MBTI terms — and use it as a tag for jokes about lacking empathy. Re-edits swapping in other characters' avatars, or laying different songs over the same choreography, were also produced in bulk.