Pikmin

Origin

Pikmin began as a Nintendo real-time strategy series launched on the GameCube in 2001. In Korea, however, the word became an internet meme through a different route: Pikmin Bloom, the location-based augmented-reality mobile game that Niantic and Nintendo released together in October 2021. Players grow seedlings and plant flowers in proportion to the steps they actually walk, and the Korean release came out alongside the global one.

The Korean boom arrived three years late. Weverse Magazine reported that Pikmin Bloom suddenly took off around November 2024, with more than 1.4 million Korean players. A December 4th, 2024 article in Digital Insight credited a friend-adding update built around QR codes and SNS sharing, plus the visibility of NewJeans members playing the game on live broadcasts. Reviewers also framed it as a "healing" game — a quiet screen of blooming flowers set against louder, more dopamine-driven apps.

The meme itself is about a sound, not a mechanic. When you send Pikmin out on an expedition, many of them move at once and their cries overlap. Korean players transcribed that noise as "ongssi-ongssi" (옹씌옹씌). Pikmin Bloom's ad opened on the same sound, which cemented it. Through late 2024 the onomatopoeia spread across Korean communities until people who had never installed the game still recognized it.

Usage

The meme borrows one image above all: something small and numerous that trails along behind you.

For a group filing along in a line — juniors trailing a senior, a row of ducklings, coworkers heading home together: "dragging my Pikmin around"
As a bare interjection — leaving nothing but "ongssi-ongssi" in the comments when something is cute or mildly delightful
As walking motivation — posts about walking one stop instead of taking the subway, captioned "walking because of Pikmin"
As a personality-type game — riffing on the setting in which red, yellow and blue Pikmin each have different abilities

Spread and variations

Pikmin Bloom's interface is built to be screenshotted and posted, so the meme traveled easily as images. Players assigned invented personalities to each color of Pikmin and shared maps of the flowers planted along their real walking routes. Theqoo opened a dedicated Pikmin Bloom board, and DCInside hosts a Pikmin Bloom minor gallery.

One caveat: the Korean trend does not really center on the 2001 console series. The longtime series fanbase and the 2024 "ongssi-ongssi" wave barely overlap, and Pikmin-as-meme belongs to the latter.