About

Cicada Block, known as "Semi-Don" (Japanese: 蝉ドン, lit. Cicada Bam) in Japan, is the physical act of trapping someone in a corner by pressing one's hands and feet against the adjacent walls to form a one-man barricade, mimicking a perched cicada insect. The block was first introduced on Twitter and later spread to the Japanese artist community pixiv and Tumblr, where it spawned a series of crossover fanart featuring other well-known video game and anime characters.

Origin

"Semi-Don" is originally a mere joke for a typical moe situation like these images below, which are mostly shown in Japanese comics for girls. And around September 2012, this situation became to be called as "Kabe-Don" (壁ドン, lit. Wall Bam) on the Japanese web, which is a connected word of Kabe, a wall, and Don (Bam), the sound of wildly putting hands or feet on it.





The first appearance of the phrase "Semi-don" was a 4 paned picture in a tweet posted by a Japanese user named Naruse, Hatoh (成瀬ハトゥ) in October 13th, 2012.





Transcript:

1. Standard Kabe-Don

2. Kinda Wild Kabe-Don

3. Tender Kabe-Don

4. Semi-Don

A friend of mine said he/she liked 4.

This funny maneuver wasn't her original invention because the same pose was appeared in an other online gag comic in 2008. However, this tweet had scored 24000+ retweets and 8500+ favorites within its first week due to her very catchy naming to this pose "Semi-Don".

Spread

On the following day, Japanese internet users began mimicking/parodying this pose by illustration or photos on Twitter and pixiv.

On October 16th, 2012, a fanart illustration of the cicada block featuring Pokemon characters Lance and Lyra (shown below) was posted to pixiv. The same day, Tumblr user Rabulen130 reblogged the Pokemon fanart with the tag “#cicada block.”At this moment, this pose was given its English name "Cicada Block".





On the following day, Tumblr user Fideo published a post titled “If anybody’s wondering where the meme came from,” featuring a step-by-step instruction on how to form a cicada block. Within the first 24 hours, Fideo's post received over 14,300 notes. The same day, deviantArt user Sanpincha submitted a cartoon strip titled “PGNC: Cicada block’d,” featuring the characters Diego and Chel from the Pokemon Gijinka Nuzlocke Challenge (shown below, right).





Also on October 17th, Tumblr user StainedBrain submitted a Homestuck edition of the cicada block, which depicted the troll Karkat blocking the character Nepeta in a corner (shown below, left), and Tumblr user fideo submitted a photograph of two men demonstrating the block in live-action taken from a twitter post (shown below, right). Within the first 24 hours, the posts gained more than 2,400 notes and 4,500 notes, respectively. On October 18th, a “Cicada Block” theme page was created under the categories “poses” and “meme” on the art-sharing website Zero Chan.





Notable Examples

The meme has continued to spread on Tumblr , deviantArt and pixiv under the tag "#cicada block" or "蝉ドン".





Search Interest

Know Your Meme Store

External References