“Curse you Bayle!” is the first line of a copypasta meme pulled from the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC for the video game Elden Ring. Bayle the Dread is a dragon and an optional boss fight in the DLC, and the full text of the copypasta can be heard when the player summons the NPC Igon the Drake Warrior during the battle.
The sheer drama of Igon’s speech made for ideal copypasta material, and it quickly spread in various forms across social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok.
The full version of what Igon the Drake Warrior says during the Bayle the Dread boss fight is as follows:
Curse you, Bayle! I hereby vow! You will rue this day! Behold, a true Drake Warrior! And I, Igon! Your fear made flesh! Solid of scale you might be, foul dragon … But I will riddle with holes your rotten hide! With a hail of harpoons! With every last drop of my being!
The speech from this NPC became a copypasta, which is any block of words, typically somewhat long and speech-like, that is copied and pasted over and over as a kind of spam in order to mock the original text and/or the person who said it.
The speech by Igon in Shadow of the Erdtree is delivered in a slow and drawn-out manner, with all of it said while the player is engaging in an epic battle against a massive fire-breathing dragon, making it so much funnier. In one popular video uploaded to YouTube that shows the full fight, the player has nearly defeated Bayle by the time Igon is done talking.
Something so unnecessarily dramatic lends itself to the copypasta meme format, and people soon began to post the text with silly emojis or reenact the speech in TikTok videos.
Igon the Drake Warrior, who gave the speech to his mortal enemy Bayle the Dread, was voiced by voice and screen actor Richard Charles Lintern. Watchers of the historical drama series The Crown might recognize him as Stephen Ward from the episode "Mystery Man."
Lintern has also appeared in the British miniseries The Reckoning and the 1998 film Lost Souls. He has also worked as a narrator for several documentaries including NASA's Unexplained Files and How the Universe Works.
This appears to be his first time voice acting in a video game, and we think he did a fine job.
The popular video game Elden Ring was released on February 25, 2022, and the DLC followed on June 21, 2024. The same day as the release of Shadow of the Erdtree, YouTube account Boss Fight Database posted footage of one of their players battling Bayle the Dread. The video included the full speech by Igon.
On June 23, Twitter user @PatStaresAt posted a tweet joking about the discourse around the DLC's difficulty level that included a screenshot from the game showing the captioned dialogue reading "Curse you Bayle!" This was one of the earlier memes making fun of Igon's speech, and more would soon follow.
As the week went on, the "curse you Bayle" speech began to appear in copypasta form, first in tweets using the "emojipasta" format (copypasta but broken up with emojis) and then in video form. It wasn't long before it was being combined with other memes.
On YouTube, one user created a video combining the "babe please stop" meme with Igon's speech. The joke then spread to TikTok, where fan edits drew millions of views. Then the lip sync videos began to appear, with users acting out the dramatic speech. Others played the sound over real-world objects that troubled them or looked vaguely dragon-like.
@eldenring_2024 Curse you, Bayle! #엘든링 #eldenring #엘든링편집 #eldenringedit #추천 #fyp ♬ 오리지널 사운드 - 근든링 재밌다
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