Lemon

Origin

The drawing meme commonly called the "lemon meme" in Korea is properly known as "Thour 🍋." It is a two-panel comic: in the first panel a character bites into a lemon, and in the second the sourness crumples their face inward — often so far that the features disappear entirely.

The first instance is a September 19th, 2019 post by Twitter user @PetrichorCrown, showing a cat's face collapsing after tasting a lemon, captioned "Am I a comic artist now?" It drew about 6,600 retweets and over 19,000 likes. The format was already complete at that point, but for years it remained a one-off drawing rather than a trend. Know Your Meme's "Thour 🍋" entry documents this lineage.

Spread

The intermediate step was a bird illustration posted by Twitter user @cki_0xn on June 4th, 2023. Within a year it passed 56,000 retweets and 189,000 likes, establishing "feeding a character a lemon" as a recognized drawing subject.

The decisive moment came on May 4th, 2024, when the artist CenoCrocodile (@CenoCrocodile) posted their crocodile character eating a lemon with the single-word caption "Thour." The post passed 215,000 likes and 34,000 retweets in six days, and the name "Thour" stuck to the format from then on. Over the following days it turned into a redraw challenge, with other artists reproducing the same two-panel composition using their own characters.

Korea picked up this May 2024 wave directly. Collection posts appeared on boards such as Inven's Open Issue Gallery and Ruliweb under names like "the crumpled lemon meme," and the format became far better known there as the "lemon meme" than by its original title.

Variations

Notable redraws from the days right after the surge include:

May 4th, 2024 — @MAO_ComicArtLab posted a version with their character "Small Tora"
May 5th, 2024 — Pt0H2 posted a version featuring the VTuber Amelia Watson (1,600 likes over five days)
May 9th, 2024 — @Varleitt posted a version featuring the VTuber Gawr Gura (3,600 likes in a day)
May 9th, 2024 — @Sususususulang posted a version featuring the Pokémon Vaporeon (2,300 likes)

Artists also played against the setup. When the subject was a famously voracious character, the second panel would often show them calmly finishing the lemon, peel and all, betraying the expected reaction.

How it is used

As fan art: redrawing a favorite character in one's own style, using the second panel to reveal something about that character's personality
As a reaction image for anything unbearably sour or otherwise overwhelming
As a figure for the face someone makes on hearing unwelcome news
As a form of character interpretation — arguing that a given character would simply eat the lemon without flinching

Sources

Know Your Meme, "Thour 🍋" — the September 19th, 2019 @PetrichorCrown original, the June 4th, 2023 @cki_0xn post, the May 4th, 2024 @CenoCrocodile post that triggered the trend, and the redraw examples and figures
Inven Open Issue Gallery, "An introduction to the meme of characters licking lemons" — how the format was introduced to Korean communities
Ruliweb, "A collection of crumpled lemon memes" — the name used in Korea and a set of examples