If you know any gamers, you know that they can have a tendency to be both obsessed with children’s media and also surprisingly brutal and not G-rated in their sense of humor.
Megamind is an animated movie from Dreamworks starring Will Ferrell as the titular character, which came out in 2010. If you’ve forgotten about it entirely, or missed it when it first came out, you’re not alone.
Its box office earnings were described by the LA Times as “tepid,” but for such a run-of-the-mill kids movie, it spawned an above-average number of memes.
Megamind memes have their own subreddit and Discord server, and they feature an assortment of characters, for just as many use cases. Notable examples include: Mind Size / Brain Size, Metroman Leaving, You’re A Villain Alright Just Not A Super One, My Death Was Greatly Exaggerated, and one featuring Jonah Hill’s Character, Hal Stewart.
When Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022, the Hal Stewart character one had a pretty big—if fleeting—moment.
But today we’re talking about the most famous Megamind meme of all, “No Bitches?” Megamind himself is an animated character with a lot of faces and expressions, so it makes sense that he’d be a blank slate to project any number of feelings onto.
On October 27th 2021, X user @artist_donna posted stills of the Megamind trailer comparing different Megamind expressions to different characters in Dream SMP—which is a widely-popular fantasy world created and run on a Minecraft server by gaming YouTuber “Dream.” On the thread, one image in particular was of Megamind looking into a peephole of a door.
Of anything from this original thread, this one specifically had the most success as a standalone reaction image.
In early November, it was posted in video format to Instagram. This time it ultimately received over 138,000 likes, and added fuel to the growing meme. However, it really took off when someone on iFunny applied the caption from which the meme’s final form takes its name, “No Bitches?”
This should be self-explanatory, but it's a phrase that's often used to mock people, often teenagers and 20-somethings into animation, and gaming, and are heavily online, who seemingly have no sexual or romantic contact in real life.
Despite its clear intent, it's the brevity of “No Bitches?” that allows it to be applied to lots of different scenarios.
Want a lighter, more literal take on it? How about No Glasses? Or No Money? Or No Peaches? So “No Bitches?” quickly became a way to do one of two things: Call someone stupid and worthless, or quickly joke about literally any fandom you can think of.
But despite its broad popularity we actually can’t fully wrap this one up without once more zeroing in on gaming and geek-dom—this time specifically Elden Ring.
Players of what’s been hailed as one of the greatest video games of all time—which came out just four months after the Dream SMP tweet—will find it nigh-impossible to level up their character at first, because they’re, quote, “maidenless.”
Cue all of the mean gamers in the Elden Ring subreddit posting “No Maidens?” posts. To date, it's maybe the most popular spin off of Megamind’s “No Bitches?”
Megamind’s character arc is that he’s born to be a villain, but ends up a hero. And the people posting “No Bitches?” are ultimately trying to say mean things to some people, but in the process, making others laugh. So, Megamind himself is a little good and a little bad.
Maybe this meme is too.
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