Ramjwi Thunder

Origin

"Ramjwi Thunder" started appearing around 2007 on the Dungeon & Fighter board of DCInside. The phrase carries no meaning of its own; it is classified as a form of clickbait titling.

The image has a different lineage. The picture of a squirrel wielding lightning powers had been circulating in overseas communities first, so the visual and the concept predate the Korean version. What Korea added was the clickbait usage, which turned it into a separate meme.

The mechanism: start a post title as though announcing something serious, then hijack its final syllable into "…da / ramjwi thunder!!!" Click through and the body contains nothing but a squirrel composited with lightning. Having been baited is itself the content.

Spread

At the time, clickbait titles had become so common on that board that they had gone stale. "Ramjwi Thunder" arrived by welding a grave-sounding sentence to a squirrel — two things with no relation whatsoever — and the sheer irrelevance is what worked. Even people who were sick of bait titles conceded this one was funny, and it went on to become the definitive example of the form.

It has also left marks beyond the internet. Park Sang-hoon, developer of the Korean indie platformer The Ramsey, told Gamemeca that he had originally planned a hamster protagonist to memorialize a hamster he had kept, but after encountering the "Ramjwi Thunder" image online he was moved enough to change the lead to a squirrel. One image macro changed the species of a commercial game's protagonist.

A Common Confusion

Because it involves an electric rodent, the meme frequently gets tied to Pikachu — a separate thread that has nothing to do with its origin. For what it's worth, in a 2018 Yomiuri Shimbun interview, designer Atsuko Nishida stated that Pikachu was modeled on a squirrel.