Memes / Arknights

Ko ko da NO.

Part of what's driven Arknights's popularity in China and beyond is how quickly its memetics took off... and there are a lot of them.

---

Please add entries in the following format if possible:

• The meme. [[labelnote:Explanation]]The explanation behind the meme, if necessary.[[/labelnote]] ^ExplanationLike this.
  • Further mutations and successor memes, if any.

---

Operators (A - L)

• Aak
  • Aak wants your sacrifices!​^ExplanationAak is infamous among the playerbase for his tendency to kill his teammates​ with his Cast From Hitpoints skills, with him nonchalantly shooting your operator like he did his enemies​ when he uses his skills didn't help the case.
  • Wait, this is an Ifrit tile? Always has been.^ExplanationDue to his Team Killer potentials, Aak is also sometimes used by players to get rid of pre-placed operators in some event maps in order to replace them with more effective ones. The most recent example is Twilight of Wolumonde's TW-4, where the pre-placed Suzuran occupies a buff tile that would be great to have Ifrit sitting on, leading to players deploying Aak just to get rid of her.
  • Aak's Durians^ExplanationThis meme originated from the name of Aak's S3, Durian-Flavored Stimpack. Due to its potentially lethal side effects (along with his S2's), players have joked about how it's probably the durian flavoring that's so deadly, since the real fruit is well-known for its very pungent and overwhelming natural odor. Later implementations of the meme usually have Aak literally weaponizing durians as bludgeoning weapons, and beating the shit out of his fellow operators with them.
  • Anyway, that's how I lost my medical license.^ExplanationSince Aak is noted as an Expy of The Medic, the logical extension is of course, putting the Arknights Operator in the signature scenes of Meet the Medic. In this case, stuffing a whole durian into an unlucky Reunion goon, while Warfarin, the other Expy, grins in the background.
• Ambriel
  • Ambriel committing tax evasion^ExplanationIn one of her voice lines, Ambriel expresses a desire to avoid Executor, who wants to make sure she's "fulfilling her obligations", and claims that she doesn't need to worry because she pays all her taxes on time. However, the combination of her claim and her nervousness around Executor has led fans to take it as a Suspiciously Specific Denial. Thus spawned a meme about Ambriel committing a variety of tax-related crimes (similar to the memes about Yoshi), and Executor showing up to hound or punish her for them.
  • So this is what the world would look like if Ambriel paid her taxes.^ExplanationAround the same time that Ambriel debuted on the Global server, Yostar released a new mobile game for beta testing called Blue Archive. Since the game involves schoolgirls as angels, demons, and catgirls armed with guns, this led fans to joke that Blue Archive is set in the future of Terra, despite both games being made by different developers (Blue Archive is developed and [published globally] by Nexon), where Ambriel paying her taxes led to Laterano bringing world peace to Terra and ending discrimination between the various races and nations. Others joke that Blue Archive is actually set in a Laterano school (despite all of the students there, including those from Russian and Chinese-based schools, having Japanese names, making it more closer to Higashi in concept), and Ambriel paying her taxes is helping the school.
• Amiya
  • Donkey^Explanation Due to the way her bunny ears are drawn, Chinese fans joke that Amiya is actually a donkey and not a rabbit. It got joked so much that first time fans at first really thought Amiya was a donkey.
  • Jealous Amiya ^ExplanationAmiya is one of many Operators that has a privileged relationship with the Doctor, and as such, she try her best to protect them as best she can. Fans decided to mess this characteristic by making her into a Clingy Jealous Girl: whenever she saw the Doctor talking (or in some extreme cases, getting laid) to a female Operator, even towards Kal'tsit, she just simply surprised at best and being a Violently Protective Girlfriend or even a yandere at worst.
    • This meme has a variant where the Doctor is caught by Jealous Amiya playing other gacha games, for example, she catches them playing at being a Kuranta idol manager in Uma Musume or a school teacher of Sankta in Blue Archive, or she cunningly makes them slip up by slipping false files of shipgirls, Heroic Spirits, T-Dolls, Valkyries, or Nikkes, and thus catches them when they accidentally identify said files and asks why they know them by name.
  • Amiya has joined Guardknights^ExplanationA play on the "Guardknights" meme, this meme in particular spawned when Hypergryph revealed that Amiya will be able to dual class as either a Caster or a Guard. Further memes describe her as getting so tired of being Overshadowed by Awesome in the Caster class that she decided to straight-up change to a Guard.
  • AEmiya ^ExplanationThanks to a number of unusual similarities Amiya shares with Shirou Emiya, Fate/Stay Night fans began cracking jokes about her idealism, her ability to project swords and copy skills, and the fact that she is aided by the Royal Heir of Victoria.
  • "What the F..." ^ExplanationThe announcement post for the "What the Firelight Casts" event was cut off to sound like a cut-off curse. Cue jokes that Amiya is learning how to curse but got cut off by her Parental Substitute (Mostly the Doctor) from completing the sentence.
• Ansel
  • "She's a He!?"^ExplanationNew players mistaking Ansel for a girl due to his Dude Looks Like a Lady appearance and Crossdressing Voice. On the flip side, many came to like him even more after finding out he's really a dude.
• Aosta
  • Aosta ^ExplanationDue to an oversight on global, Aosta is missing his full Operator description that is normally shown in places such as the store, ending up with a broken description that merely says "Aosta". Expect long chains of comments replying with nothing but "Aosta" whenever the Operator is brought up in discussions or posts.
• Aurora
  • Cute polar bear steals the Doctor^ExplanationOne scene in the animation PV for the Break the Ice event shows Aurora, who's of the bear-like Ursus race, fleeing with Sharp while carrying the Doctor over her shoulder. Cue the fandom running with this in amusing ways.
• Bagpipe
  • "Can't understand a word she's saying. Perfect, 10/10." ^ExplanationEver since English voice acting was added to the game, and particularly since Operators started receiving English voices with region-appropriate accents, fans have been clamoring for Bagpipe to be voiced with a Scottish accent. The Chapter 13 update included an EN dub for Bagpipe voiced by Scottish voice actor Lauren Conroy. In addition to generally rejoicing, a fair number of English-speaking fans have commented that they find it difficult to understand what Bagpipe is saying without the aid of subtitles — which, given how notoriously incomprehensible the Scottish dialect is for non-native speakers, only adds to the charm.
  • "But steel is heavier than feathers...." / "Purple burglar alarm" ^ExplanationWith the release of Bagpipe's EN voice, many fans have also started associating her with Limmy, with these quotes in particular frequently showing up in related discussion.
• Beanstalk
  • Beanstalk the B R E E D E R^ExplanationA rather overeager fan of Beanstalk wrote a long and elaborate copypasta about why they find her attractive, emphasizing the 'breeder' part of her job raising domesticated metal crabs with amusingly ribald speculation about how she had a wild side that comes out at night in bed. Her "Gift Uncompleted" skin that was released during "Break the Ice" only intensfied the jokes.
• Blaze
  • Blaze the gas guzzler^ExplanationDue to Blaze's Hot-Blooded nature and exothermic capabilities, players have joked how she likely has an internal combustion engine, which runs on ethanol. Fanart comics about this typically depict Blaze quaffing (or trying to quaff) huge amounts of gasoline and oil like one would tap water.
• Blue Poison
  • "Blue Poison jokes are toxic"^ExplanationAssociating Blue Poison with words relating to toxin (her powers), and making puns and wordplays out of them in Blue Poison fan content and memes.
• Catapult
  • "Reserve OP Team A6, Catapult, reporting in! Hey, I can tell you're hella different from that stuffy old bit - I mean, that esteemed, honorable instructor Ms. Dobermann. Right? Like it's obvious!"^ExplanationCatapult has a longer-than-average onboarding line for an Operator in general and a 3* Operator in particular, and the game does not let you navigate away from an Operator's recruitment screen until their onboarding line is finished. Couple this with Catapult being kind of obnoxious in general, and she quickly earned many Doctors' ire for wasting their time during recruitment. Whenever Catapult comes up in online discussion, it's common to see her onboarding line copy-pasted in its entirety as an indicator of the poster's disdain for her.
• Cement
  • "Doccy~"^ExplanationCement refers to Doctor, as "Doccy" in the English dub, being her take for the Dokutah-related memes.
  • "Das Conk KREET BAYBEE!" ^ExplanationIn the English dub, Cement says this phrase in her "Trust Tap" when the Doctor asks what's inside her shield. This was an Ascended Meme from when she was initially revealed in the Chinese Arknights server, with fans making "Das Conk Creet Baybee" and other similar jokes related to her due to her code name.
• Ceobe
  • Ceobe being a Big Eater.^ExplanationA major aspect of Ceobe's personality is her love of food and tendency to break into the kitchen and eat large amounts of it, which has spawned many gags in fan content.
  • "Hungry."^ExplanationWhen reprimanded by Gummy after the latter caught her breaking into the kitchen, Ceobe answers her questions with this single word. When Gummy later explains the signs made to ward her off and Ceobe indicates her understanding of them, she asks Ceobe why she broke in anyways...and Ceobe responds with the exact same reply.
  • Dadadadada!^ExplanationOne of Ceobe's particularly unusual skill activation lines, comparable to Exusiai's "Apple pie!". It's endeared itself to the fanbase, to the point where much like Exusiai it's considered her Catchphrase. Listen to it here.
• Ch'en (the Holungday)
  • "Ch'en Sir"(陈sir)^ExplanationA meme regarding Ch'en's character lore as the head of L.G.D's Special Inspection Unit, renowned for her outstanding achievements. The added honorific "sir" on the meme referring to a uniquely Hong Kong form of address, a term of weirdly colloquial respect; particularly on police forces.
    • Acknowledged in one moment in Episode 6 when an LGD agent addresses Ch'en as "Ch'en Sir".
  • 37 years old.^ExplanationThe Korean server accidentally mistranslated Ch'en's age, stating she was 37 years old instead of 27. This has given rise to memes about Ch'en being self-conscious about her age.
• Chiave
  • Chiave Buff ^ExplanationChiave's talent gives him bonuses for every deployed Robot, while reducing redeployment time of Robots in turn. As such, whenever Arknights releases a new Robot operator, expect people to call it a Chiave buff.
• Chongyue
  • Male Saga/The newest member of Loudknights^ExplanationUpon release, Chongyue quickly became notorious for having extremely loud and lengthy skill activation lines, which coupled with the spammable nature of his skills (particularly his third skill), means he will constantly repeat his lines in combat to the point of cutting off his own sentences. Players began claiming that he dethroned Saga, who is also memetic for the same reasons, as the noisiest Operator in the game.
    • They nerfed Chongyue to the ground ^ExplanationWith the Leaves Chasing Fire event update, Chongyue's skill was patched to greatly reduce the frequency of his lines to normal levels. Many players, who had embraced Chongyue's loudness, were disappointed with the change, jokingly calling it a nerf that 'killed' Chongyue (somewhat notable as outside of fixing certain bugs or exploits, Hypergryph never directly nerfs Operators in serious contexts).
  • KEI 🏋️ NARIO 🤸‍♂️ NAZASU 💪
    Sensou 🚶 hyakushiki 🧎
    Sensou 🧘‍♂️ hyakushiki 🐉
    Kisamara 👐 no 🐲 mondai 🤸‍♂️
    Sensou 👊 hyakushiki 🏃
    KEI 🐲 NARIO 📣 NAZASU 💁‍♂️
    KEIHA 🥋 SUREBA 🏋️ KOUCHOU 💪 OCHIRU 🏃^ExplanationA transcript of Chongyue's skill activation lines with emojis added throughout became a popular copypasta in the comments of videos featuring him. The meme has since been updated to accommodate his English voicelines as well.
• Cuora
  • Cuora secretly being a JoJo's Bizarre Adventure character^ExplanationCuora's first deployment and battlecry lines are "ORA ORA!" and "MUDA MUDA!", respectively.
    • Also applies to Beehunter. Bonus points for having rapid-fire punches.
• Dorothy
  • FREE DOROTHY ^ExplanationDue to the differing schedules the CN and Global servers operate on, Yostar decided to release the "Ideal City" event out of the CN server's release order as the Global server's 3rd anniversary, which skipped over "To Be Continued" and "Dorothy's Vision" which on CN were released first. "Operation Ashring" was released as scheduled after "Ideal City", delaying even further. Yostar then compensated by releasing "To Be Continued" immediately after "Operation Ashring" ended, and fans were expecting the same for "Dorothy's Vision". However, Yostar went back to the CN release order and released "Dossoles Holiday" rerun afterwards, leading fans wondering what happened to the "Dorothy's Vision" event and making jokes that Hypergryph is holding the event's titular main character, Dorothy, prisoner. It is not until the announcement that "Dorothy's Vision" will be globally released for March 14, 2023, thus finally setting Dorothy free from her prison.
    • "Take a picture, don't forget her; let it linger in your view." ^ExplanationLyrics from Dorothy's Image Song Magic Theorem, which have been re-interpreted in light of the delays as Dorothy asking players not to forget about her.
• Dusk
  • "Dusk from Ireland" / Irish Dusk^ExplanationOne part of the Global 2.5 Anniversary stream was the debut of Dusk's English voice actor, with the screen showing the sentence "I'm Aileen Mythen, the English voice of Dusk from Ireland." The Ambiguous Syntax sparked jokes that Dusk is from Ireland and that she'll be siding with Dublinn.
• Ebenholz
  • Ebenholz tormenting the Voice of Terra by listening to heavy metal. ^ExplanationIn one of the 123 Rhodes Island!? gag strips, Vigna is surprised to find Ebenholz listening to Operation Pyrite. When asked, he admits that while he doesn't like the song, he's listening to it to shut up the Voice of Terra, which hates it even more than he does. The fanbase found this hilariously cathartic in the wake of everything Lingering Echoes put him through, and like to depict it as Ebenholz's go-to method of asserting dominance over the Sorcerous Overlord's voice in his head.
  • Ebenheimer ^ExplanationWhile considered to be something of a Low-Tier Letdown in the broader player base, properly utilized, a max-level Ebenholz can outright one-shot some of the bosses. Combined with Oppenheimer releasing a few months after he came out on Global servers, his fanbase came up with a plethora of "I have become death, destroyer of worlds" jokes, as well as art and memes pairing Ebenholz with nuclear bomb imagery, including riffs on the ''Oppenheimer'' poster.
• Eunectes
  • "My Anaconda don't!"^ExplanationAfter Eunectes was revealed, players have immediately made a meme out of how plump she is, especially her thighs and rears. Cue the endless amount of meme edits superimposing her onto the cover art of Anaconda by Nicki Minaj.
• Executor (the Ex Foedere)
  • Terminator Executor^ExplanationDue to his Super-Strength, robotic personality, difficulty understanding human mannerisms, and use of shotguns, many fans draw similarities between Executor and the T-800 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Fans have also drawn parallels between Executor's relationship with Vermeil as her protector to the T-800's relationship with John Connor.
  • FedEx^ExplanationWith Executor's real name being Federico, people started calling him this, although he delivers death rather than mail.
  • Autism win^ExplanationA lot of the fanbase considers Executor to be autistic, or at least autism-coded. In Hortus de Escapismo event, he comes across as the least discriminating and most level-headed Laterano character in the story, leading some to half-jokingly conclude that Executor's autism is what allowed him to ignore the Lateran predjudices and actually do his job properly.
• Exusiai
  • Exusiai hungers for apple pie.^ExplanationOne of Exusiai's skill activation lines is a rather random exclamation of "apple pie", and she also references pie in her talk lines at one point. This has led to all kinds of memetics about everyone's favorite gun angel being obsessed with pie. For example. This became acknowleged in-game during the Code of Brawl event, which included constant references to apple pie in its mission descriptions, and also featured Exusiai baking some for Bison's welcoming party. Referenced again in Guide Ahead, the first event to take place in Exusiai's home nation of Laterano, in which the EX stages are all named after desserts. GA-EX-7 is called "Apple Pie", and the stage description claims that the demand for it has gotten so high that it's starting to frustrate dessert vendors.
    The party's only just getting started, so before that, you should grab a slice of apple pie! Why does it always have to be apple pie?
• Fiammetta
  • Suffering-chan^ExplanationFiammetta's tendency to get saddled with embarrasing codenames as far back as Code of Brawl resulted in jokes being made about it. Of these codenames, 'Suffering' is easily the most popular as it was both the one she was introduced under and an apt summary of her feelings on the whole situation.
  • Egg-laying^{Explanation (NSFW!)}A number of off-colour jokes about Fiammetta (and sometimes, other Liberi like Astesia or Archeosaur like Tomimi) using her/their (unfertilized) egg(s) for cooking, in particular to make food for their prospective significant others as part of shipping jokes. This memelet also applies to other Liberi, but due to Fiammetta's status as being dragged into Mostima's orbit as part of the shipping tangle around Penguin Logistics, it applies to her the most, and gained infamy due to a H-doujin by kataokasan where Mostima and Lemuen are depicted using Fiammetta's eggs to bake sweet pastries in the aftermath of lewding her.
    • Did you lay this egg?^ExplanationA related meme, that the birdgirl Liberi lay eggs instead of having periods, which originates from a CLAMP Jojo doujinshi shipping Jotaro and Kakoyin.
  • Fiammetta's potty mouth/Ancient Roman Diss Track/(Laterano Swearing)^{Explanation (NSFW for archaic rude language)}The English translation of the climax of an angry Fiammetta confronting Andoain has her referencing a specific and very profane poem by the Roman poet Catullus, which naturally led to a number of jokes being cracked about her use of profanity in Laterano.
• Firewatch
  • Firewatch and HIMARS ^ExplanationFirewatch's S2 has her call an artillery strike on enemy clusters in her range. Thanks to some memes from r/noncredibledefense and Firewatch being from Sami, which is basically not-Finland, she was soon associated with HIMARS through the power of memery, complete with fanart of her spooking W with her beefed-up arty.
• Friston-3
  • The memes, Doctor! ^ExplainationFriston-3's English voice, provided by John Kassir, sounds very similar to Kassir's earlier role as Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance's Monsoon. Naturally, it didn't take long before the Western fanbase came to associate Friston with Monsoon's infamous "memes" speech.
  • Friston-3 Times Faster. ^ExplanationIn Japanese, Friston-3 is played by Shūichi Ikeda, prompting a lot of jokes related to what is easily Ikeda's most iconic role: Char Aznable. In particular, Friston's "3" designation and single red eye led many to compare him to Char's red Zaku mobile suit.
  • Come stop me, Doctor, I'm about to do something wicked. ^{explanation (spoilers for Lone Trail)}Given how there was fears of the system Kirsten Wright developed with Friston's aid being used as a superweapon, Gundam fans who found out about Friston's connection to said events, and his Japanese VA being the literal Voice of Char, made the appropriate Char's Counterattack joke about the whole situation.
• Gavial (the Invincible)
  • Gavial the Fucking Invincible / Sundowner Gavial^ExplanationGavial's alternate version, Gavial the Invincible, immediately spawned comparisons to Sundowner and his own memetic "I'm fucking invincible!" line.
• Goldenglow
  • Pink Doggo forgotten ^ExplanationDuring the 1st Anniversary livestream, a post-credits sequence◊ teases then-upcoming operators Thorns, Surtr, Saga, Archetto, and Mountain, with Saga being the last to debut before the 2nd anniversary. Most conspicuously, there is a sixth operator between Thorns and Surtr, a pink-haired girl assumed to be a Perro due to the shape of her ears and her resemblance to Korone Inugami. After the 2nd anniversary passed with no mention made of her, she became the only one of the bunch who did not appear at all in the interim between the 1st and 2nd anniversaries. As a result, this caused jokes that she was forgotten by Hypergryph, even reaching the point where people started photoshopping the 1st anniversary screencap to replace her with other operators such as Passenger or Saileach, almost as if she never existed at all.
    • Pink Doggo wasn't even a doggo to begin with ^ExplanationAfter almost two years of radio silence the elusive pink-haired girl would finally resurface as Goldenglow, the featured six-star for A Light Spark in Darkness. This also came with the revelation that she was a Feline, not a Perro like fans had assumed; specifically being based on a Scottish Fold, hence her floppy ears. This led to a whole deluge of fanart in which she's mistaken for a Perro, especially after her artist, Namie, called people out for thinking she was a dog.
• Gravel
  • Collecting kisses ^ExplanationGravel is by far the most common 4★ operator to obtain in Recruitment, and is always a welcome sight as her tokens are an easy source of Distinction Certificates. Since she introduces herself by kissing the Doctor, "collecting kisses" and other similar phrases are often used to describe pulling her.
• Gummy
  • Cannibal Gummy^{Explanation (Children of Ursus spoilers!)}After the disturbing revelations of "Children of Ursus", there has been a surge of fanarts depicting Gummy as a deranged cannibal, usually being played for laughs, with Dur-Nar being a frequent victim. Keep in mind that Hypergryph's style of storytelling will rarely ever make anything explicit, as the narration of the side story uses ambiguous words that leave strong implications to the players' imaginations.
• Hellagur
  • "Hellajokes"^ExplanationMaking puns and wordplays out of Hellagur's name, usually by changing the last syllable. A lot had already came up, such as "Hellagod", "Hellagood", "Hellagreat", "Hellagirl", "Hellagurl", "Hellaguy", "Hellagay", "Hellagrill", "Hellawhat!?" among many other examples.
• Hibiscus (the Purifier)
  • Hibiscus' cooking ^ExplanationA Running Gag about Hibiscus' tendency to make some bizarre "healthy" food which are remarked upon by other Operators to the point where she's become a memetic Lethal Chef.
  • Hibiscus and her musician reverse-harem^ExplanationThe event "Lingering Echoes" focuses on Hibiscus going to Leithania and fans noticed the abundance of attractive male characters introduced in the event, with two of them (Ebenholz and Czerny) eventually joining Rhodes Island under Hibiscus' suggestion. This led to jokes of Hibiscus getting her own harem and being on her way to rival Texas.
• Hoederer:
  • Hoederer escaped the death flag due to being a simp. ^ExplanationWhen the 2023 April Fools event was running in the Chinese launch, fans have found details of Hoederer being in U-Official's chat stream and is apparently her fan. Since the April Fools event takes place after the events of the "Shadows of a Dying Sun" arc, fans who learn of it have made jokes that Hoederer escaped any hints of death due to being a fan of U-Official. The jokes make a return when Hoederer was announced to be Promoted to Playable for Chapter 13, complete with jabs that Hoederer was due to get a Shining Step skin that turned him into U-Official's manager and biggest fan and changed his large sword into a giant glowstick.
  • Hoederer’s buns/cake. ^ExplanationAs a rare example of a playable Operator who qualifies as a Hunk with visible Heroic Build and decidedly more rugged and masculine features even compared to other attractive male characters such as Młynar or Chongyue along with his E2 art oddly portraying him in a male variant of a Boobs-and-Butt Pose, Hoederer gets a lot of attention from fans in that regard, with many players very vocally admiring his physique and citing it as their reason to pull for him.
• Horn
  • Horn being mistaken for a Feline^ExplanationIn a reversal of the Feline Goldenglow being mistaken for a Perro, Horn is a Lupo, but some players that look at her from a glance mistake her for a Feline, possibly due to her passing resemblance to Blaze. Even funnier is that when Horn made her debut in the Global server, her file incorrectly classified her as a Feline, to the amusement of a lot of players, though this mistake was later fixed in Lingering Echoes.
  • Strange Lupos lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government! ^ExplanationHorn's To Effloresce Whitely skin is themed around The Lady of the Lake and features an animation of her emerging from a pool of water bearing a legendary sword. The Monty Python and the Holy Grail jokes were as quick as they were inevitable.
• Irene
  • Playing Tic-Tac-Toe on Irene's forehead.^ExplanationUpon making her first appearance as an NPC in Under Tides, Irene was immediately bullied by fans for her massive forehead and awkwardly-cut bangs that only served to accentuate it. The most famous and frequently-referenced example of this came from animator harlequin wheels, who used her to recreate a video of a Twitter user ranting about how people are playing tic-tac-toe on his forehead in the replies to one of his selfies. Ironically, this meme only grew in popularity after Stultifera Navis gave her an updated design with a less prominent forehead.
  • I live in Spain without the "a".^ExplanationWhile the meme itself, a play on the phrase "I live in Spain without the S", didn't originate with Arknights, the fanbase came to associate it with Irene as she hails from Terra's equivalent to Spain and her Skill 3 is a rapid Spin Attack.
  • "You are a fruit" ^ExplanationAs they're boarding the Stultifera Navis, a now-lucid Specter teasingly calls Irene "a fruit of elegance and grace". This line, cut down to its first four words, quickly became memetic among the fanbase, and it's frequently quoted when poking fun at Irene. It's especially popular with those who ship Irene with Specter, or with another woman in general, considering the connotations of calling somebody a 'fruit'.
• Ifrit
  • "What's 6x3?" ^ExplanationThis is a meme spawned from the side stories of Operational Intelligence where Ifrit is given math homework to do, which she somehow struggles at. Because of this, Flanderization struck again, got combined with Hardstop Lucas' already memetic video, and now Ifrit is stuck with this memetic reputation as a comically-inept child at math, like here (note that on the paper, all answers are labled 'C').
• Jessica (the Liberated)
  • Jessica being Secretly Wealthy^ExplanationDuring the game's tutorial, Jessica reveals to Dobermann that she bought a huge crate of ammunition with her snack fund so she could train with her pistol, which she also bought using her own dosh. This being a near-apocalyptic setting where guns and ammunition are rarer than gold, and therefore disgustingly expensive, Jessica being able to afford such a(n allegedly) high-end weapon as well as huge quantities of fresh rounds with just her pocket change implies she's incredibly loaded. Later becomes an Ascended Meme with the release of her Operator Record, revealing that she's the daughter of Raythean's CEO, and is in fact, very loaded.
  • "Bully the cat!"^ExplanationA predictable meme where players or other operators take to bullying Jessica out of her pocket money whenever they need LMD, or if the mood strikes them. Typically, Jessica is bullied the most when there's a new banner and the player fails to roll the current 6-star.
  • Jessica's Unlimited Wardrobe^ExplanationJessica was the first of a specific few operators to have three alternate costumes and an Alter form, while many others are yet to get even one. Combined with the aforementioned meme about her being rich, this naturally leads to jokes that she's the only one with enough disposable income to keep buying new clothes.
  • Crying Jessicat^ExplanationEditing Jessica's face with the crying cat meme like this◊, because her facial expression looks almost exactly like the cat, that it's easy to superimpose the two. This later becomes an Ascended Meme as one of the animations for Jessica the Liberated in the base is exactly that.
  • This edit of Jessica's Nian: Clivia skin sees a lot of use as a reaction image.
  • Jessica mocks your small dick energy. ^ExplanationUpon global release, Jessica the Liberated’s standard art was noted to be slightly edited in the Korean servers to have her right hand’s position changed, which players believe to be a form of censorship to appease an aggressive, misogynistic subsection of Korean players due to it supposedly resembling a derogatory sign for men with small genitals. Players immediately took to mocking those that provoked the edit due to the contrived nature of interpreting such a sign, with some even taking to drawing art of a smug Jessica deliberately making the sign as a Take That! to the ‘incel’ community.
• Kal'tsit
  • Kal'tsit will cut the Doctor's banana off/"Snip snip" ^Explanation As it's implied Kal'tsit and the Doctor used to be romantically involved, fans quickly turned her into a Psycho Ex-Girlfriend (or wife) who threatens to slice Doc's dick off when the doctor makes the slightest of romantic gestures to other female operators. Note that this has become a bit of a Discredited Meme, as Episode 7 reveals that Kal'tsit and the Doctor pre-amnesia basically hated and distrusted each other from the start.
  • Tsundere Kal'tsit^ExplanationThe more light-hearted portrayals have her as a tsundere who still loves the doctor, with some more tragic portrayals implying that the two were still in a relationship at the time of the Doctor's disappearance and amnesia
  • The Rhodes Island Family^ExplanationSimilar to the Rhine Labs Family, some fan artists portray the Doctor and Kal'tsit as still being in a relationship, with Amiya (and sometimes Projekt Red) being portrayed as their daughter
  • Mon3tr and I will protect everyone. Especially Mon3tr and I. ^ExplanationIn gameplay, Kal'tsit is notorious for her unique targeting for her healing which always prioritizes her summon Mon3tr and herself if they are missing any health at all, leading to situations where she will happily let allies within her range die in favor of healing scratch damage off herself or Mon3tr instead. On stages with passive damage, such as poison mist, this is exacerbated as Kal'tsit will almost never heal other operators unless her attack speed is somehow super-buffed to be faster than the tick damage. The irony of this in relation to her E2 promotion voice line has led to occasional mockery.
  • Kal'tsit's speeches^ExplanationKal'tsit has become notorious for her drawn-out Purple Prose and seeming inability to give a straight answer despite her seeming nigh-omniscience. This has been spun by fans into her being physically incapable of saying anything without starting a lengthy philosophical debate, or the length of any event story exponentially increasing whenever Kal'tsit so much as appears on screen.
  • Kal'tsit ASMR^ExplanationKal'tsit's aforementioned long-winded speeches are considered to be significantly improved by Yōko Hikasa's voice-acting. This is especially notable with Discovered Terra videos, which is filled with nothing but Kal'tsit's Info Dump about Terra's countries.
  • Kal'Dance ^ExplanationThe animation of Kal'tsit dancing in the "Running in the Dark" music video became memetically popular for clashing hilariously with her serious nature, to the point that Harlequin-Wheels ended up referencing it in his wdance_2 animation.
  • Old Well ^ExplanationOne of the cutscenes in Stultifera Navis takes place at an "Old Well", which also showed Kal'tsit's portrait. Considering just how old Kal'tsit is, this generated a significant amount of giggles from the playerbase.
  • Mon3tr Energy drink ^ExplanationMon3tr's name, its body being vaguely shaped like a jagged M, and its black and green colour scheme all call to mind Monster Energy drinks and their branding in a lot of fans' eyes, resulting in jokes comparing the two and the occasional Mon3tr-branded energy drink appearing in fanart. Jokes were also made about how Mon3tr changing colours for her Bloodline of Combat Skin was due to having changed flavors.
  • Sweet Home Terra ^{Explanation (Massive Spoilers)}Fans of the popular meme that Kal'tsit was the Doctor's ex-wife recieved a massive shock when Babel dropped the bomb of a reveal that AMa-10 was the creation of the Doctor and Priestess, with the former giving her the name Kal'tsit. This means that Kal'tsit wouldn't really be their ex-wife, but is actually closer to their daughter! For several fans, Kal'tsit is no longer the cold ex-wife, but is now the estranged daughter who is unamused by her parent's antics.

• Kjera
  • The mighty peaks of Mt Kjeragandr ^ExplanationAfter her Epoque skin came out and revealed her Hidden Buxom, fans were quick to joke about worshipping her "mighty peaks".
  • Kjera wants to become a shipgirl ^ExplanationThe story event The Rides to Lake Silberneherze has an ending where Kjera gleefully cajoles Enya to accept Muelsyse's request to have access to Mt Kjeragandr (which is where her true Feranmut body resides) in order to build a space research launch facility and cannons. Fans immediately cracked jokes about this one too, complete with talk of Mecha-Kjera being her Alternate Operator form.
• Kroos (the Keen Glint)
  • Ko ko da yo!^ExplanationKroos' skill activation voice clip (roughly translating to "here I am"), that triggers every five shots, which is incredibly common owing to her being a Fast Sniper with an auto skill. This has quickly become memetic among English-speaking fans due to how often a player using her will hear it, considering her status as a Crutch Character. Every map. Every single one. Ko. Ko. Da. Yo. This quickly evolves into Arknights's version of low rarity spook memes of gacha-based games like the "Mapo Tofu", among many others.
    • A fan of Kroos made a voice remix track entirely out of her voice (Soundcloud link here). Yes, KO KO DA YO is the major repeating sample in this masterpiece.
    • This one has become prolific enough to be referenced in both supplemental materials and in the game itself. One of the official LINE stickers features the Doctor covering Kroos's mouth before she can say it, while her future self, Kroos the Keen Glint, still has it as a skill activation line^note albeit without the singsong inflection that made it so infamous and has even started using it as a Bond One-Liner in story segments.
  • "KOKO DIO DA!"^ExplanationA variant which merges this meme with Dio Brando's memetic "Kono Dio Da!" line from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, often photo-editing Kroos' head with Dio's face as the punchline. Other similar phrases include "KO KO DIO DA YO!", "KO KO DI YO!", and "KOKO DIO!" But this turned out to be associated more to Mostima when her second skill stuns enemies in place.
  • Kroos with her eyes open.^ExplanationAccording to one of Kroos's voice lines, she doesn't want anyone to look at her eyes, which is why she keeps them shut all the time. She never explains why she doesn't want anyone to see them though, leaving fans free to speculate. Theories range from the plausible, such as Oripathy damaging her vision, to obvious jokes like her eyes being Sharingans. One of the most popular theories is that Kroos will only open her eyes if she's pushed to the point where she can't laze around anymore and has to fight seriously. And since Kroos is already considered one of the best early-game snipers (and her Keen Glint variant one of the strongest welfare operators) with her eyes closed, speculation on just what she'd be capable of with them open turned "Kroos with her eyes open" into a Memetic Badass among the fandom; one who puts every six-star sniper to shame and could take on the entirety of Reunion on her own and win.
  • "Tom Kroos"^Explanation The fandom loves making puns with Kroos's name. Example of this include the previously-stated "Tom Kroos", "Kroos Ship", "Kroosover", "Kroosaders", etc...
• Lappland
  • Lappdumb ^ExplanationA deliberately stupid-looking expression for Lappland that became memetically popular in the fan community on the same tier as Zero Sanity Doktah.
  • "Lappface" ^ExplanationA snowclone of the "X face" joke that spawned from the "Saberfaces" of Nasuverse. Players have pointed out how most of the characters illustrated by Huànxiàng Hēi Tù (i.e. Lappland and all of Penguin Logistics, even Mayer and Nian) have the same faces, all bearing roughly the same angled smug grin with very little change between them. For no reason in particular, Lappland is chosen to be the "prime face" among them. Ironically enough, Texas is the only PL member to have mostly escaped this trend, despite being drawn by the same artist and having somewhat similar facial angles. And then comes the introduction of Thorns - the first male operator drawn by Huànxiàng, whose faces were basically lifted directly from Texas' E2 CG, thus perpetuating a different flavor of the meme. Huànxiàng has likewise been compared to Nasuverse's Takashi Takeuchi, for seemingly only being able to draw the same faces over and over again regardless of what media those characters were made for.
  • She is commonly depicted as a Memetic Molester towards Texas due to her obsession with her and her Stalker without a Crush tendencies.
  • Lappland's Protractor Weapons^ExplanationJoking at how the D-shaped "hilts" of Lappland's blades look like protractors. Sometimes, this overlaps with edits◊ of replacing the actual blades with rulers.
  • The secret 6-star ^ExplanationDespite being a 5-star Lord Guard, Lappland is often considered the most powerful example of her branch due to her high burst damage and ability to Silence anything she hits. This leads to jokes that she's actually a 6-star hiding out as a 5-star Operator. Il Siracusano's epilogue, which has her duelling ol' Zaaro for three months straight, seemingly suggests that she will indeed receive a 6-star Alter version in the future.
  • Majima!/Lapptruck/Truck-kun's newest driver ^{Explanation (Spoilers)}During "Il Siracusano" Lappland suddenly smashes a truck through an entire courthouse to bail Texas out of being charged for an assassination. The already-existing comparisons between her and Majima from the Yakuza games skyrocketed. There are also jokes about the Truck Lappland drove being a local incarnation of the Isekai Truck-Kun, a truck infamous in anime for starting the isekai journey of many a lad by running them over so that their souls can be summoned to other worlds for reincarnation.
• Lava (the Purgatory)
  • "The cooler Lava". ^ExplanationThe introduction of Lava the Purgatory, an upgraded version of Lava with better stats, skills and traits, has led to many nicknames to differentiate between them. This one, in reference to a famous yearbook photo◊, has proven the most popular.
• Lee
  • Once-Lee ^ExplanationLee's Witch Feast: Trust Your Eyes skin gives him a top hat and suit with green accents as part of its Stage Magician theming. However, many fans joked that it made him look like the Once-ler from Illumination's adaptation of The Lorax instead

Operators (M - Z)

• Magallan
  • "NOOT NOOT"^ExplanationPingu's "NOOT NOOT" catchphrase is occassionally attributed to Magallan, as seen in this video.
• Melantha
  • "Activate Melantha's Skill" ^ExplainationIn many of KyoStinV's video guides on clearing stages using lower rarity operators, Melantha is used frequently due to her impressive health and damage output for a 3*, making her able to duel enemies that would expected to be far above her weight class. Her high ATK is further increased when using her Skill, making this a common phrase said in these videos, leading to it becoming a meme within the community.
• Meteor
  • Confused Meteor^ExplanationPlayers have noticed how Meteor's expression in her default CG looks a lot like the Confused Nick Young meme, thus spawning plenty of edits of her zoomed-in face with question marks being placed all around her.
• Mizuki
  • Mizuki's armpits.^ExplanationNamie, Mizuki's official artist, absolutely adores the character she drew, with one tweet of hers saying that "Mizuki's armpits are very soft". It also helps that Mizuki is also very beloved by the fanbase thanks to his very cute appearance and equally cute voice, courtesy of Ayumu Murase. Whenever Mizuki is mentioned, expect a mention of his armpits.
• Mostima
  • "ZA WARUDO!"^ExplanationMostima has a myriad of time/clock motifs, and her second and third abilities ("Lock of Shattered Time" and "Key of Chronology" respectively) involve time manipulation, especially the second skill which stuns the enemies in place (ie. stopping time). One can only guess where this went. This phrase also goes hand-in-hand with fans calling Mostima as "DIO". It also sees combination with Ceobe's second skill ("Really Hot Knives") in memes due to the latter being a Flechette Storm of thrown knives much like the one DIO uses against Jotaro.
  • For similar reasons as Lappland, Mostima is often depicted as a Memetic Molester towards Bison, some creative fans even cobbled some of their lines from Code of Brawl together into some of a rather suggestive conversation.
    Mostima: We're in no hurry, the night is young.
    Bison: Huff...huff... I can...keep going...all night...
    Mostima: Yep. You're doing great.
  • Mostima'd^ExplanationExusiai uses this term to describe Mostima's Stealth Hi/Bye tendencies in "Code of Brawl". Whenever she or someone else abruptly vanishes, expect this verb to be used to jokingly describe them. It's also used to describe the Orundum spent by players who tried to pull for Mostima and failed.
• Młynar
  • Doctor! The Nearl bloodline!^ExplanationTaking inspiration from the Silverash bloodline meme, this time, it's Młynar who pressures the doctor into either marrying Margaret (Nearl), Maria (Blemishine), or even Zofia (Whislash), in order to continue the Nearl bloodline. To add further hilarity, SilverAsh might appear and end up starting a rivalry over whose bloodline the Doctor gets to continue. Like the meme it came from, this is all Fanon, so don't take it seriously.
  • "Foul Dokutah. In search of the new 6-star. Put these foolish orundums to rest." ^ExplanationMłynar is voiced by Anthony Howell in English, who is known to have voiced Margit/Morgott in Elden Ring. Many jokes were made at how Młynar would repeatedly beat down Doctors' wallets everywhere, like how Margit beats down new Tarnished a lot.
    • "If it isn't my old friend: the Doktuh who gets no 6-stars and stacks no LMDs." ^ExplanationA variation on the above taken from Max0r's "Incorrect Summary of Elden Ring," with a slightly more intolerant version of Morgott.
  • Stupid Sexy Młynar ^ExplanationMłynar is naturally a very handsome man in a striking outfit, on top of being a deadly top-tier unit and loyal uncle to the Nearls. All of that combined makes him into an exceptional Chick Magnet, to the point that the official Arknights Instagram account posted a bunch of fanart of various girls in swimsuits, and then just a fully-clothed Młynar.
  • I can't take it anymore. I'm sick of Uncle Młynar. ^ExplanationA snowclone of a Genshin Impact copypasta about Xiangling, used in a similar manner as the original to poke fun at Młynar's Game-Breaker status and centralizing role in the meta to the point of overshadowing most other DPS options.
• Mr. Nothing
  • Mr. Nothing became Mr. Fucking ^ExplanationWhile not a bad-looking man by default, a lot of fans remarked on how much hotter his 0011 Series: Pale Moon Rising skin makes him look.
• Mudrock
  • Shortrock ^ExplanationDue to her imposing dialogue portrait and status as an unstoppable juggernaut during her boss fights, most fans pictured Mudrock as a Statuesque Stunner on par with Hoshiguma, if not even taller. This meant it came as a huge shock to them when her profile was released and listed her height as a mere 5'4" (163 cm). It's heavily implied that the armor makes her look much taller than she actually is.
  • Mudrock's a she?!? ^Explanation Due to her bulky outfit, many fans thought Mudrock was male. This was exaggerated before her playable debut, where the narration when referring to Mudrock in CN alters between male and female pronouns, while EN's narration used gender-neutral pronouns if at all. Then Roaring Flare rolled around... and it turns out Mudrock is a woman (and a rather attractive one, to boot). The fandom was quite surprised at the revelation (and so was her squadron, apparently, as her records state that nobody in her squadron realized that the random girl walking around their camps was their boss).
  • Mudbonk^ExplanationThe common memetic response to anyone posting something that can be seen as horny- or just overly thirsty in a sexual way- is to bonk them (and possibly send them to "horny jail"). Mudrock is a frequent target because she wields a sledgehammer, and "bonk" is defined as "hitting someone, usually with a blunt weapon" (such as Mudrock's sledgehammer). As a result, jokes are made about how Mudrock would bonk people who got too perverted, especially towards her.
• Muelsyse
  • After her debut on the CN server, people started drawing art of her trying to get the Doctor to drink her water clones.
  • Water wife/Elf wife^ExplanationHer assistant voice lines are a combination of flirty, playful, and outright romantic, leading to plenty of memes about her being the ideal partner for the Doctor. Her dance and camaraderie with the Doctor in Lone Trail certainly also does her favors.
  • Muelsyse, the first six-star Tactician Vanguard^ExplanationA couple of sources have referred to Muelsyse as the game's "first six-star Tactician Vanguard," ignoring the fact that this distinction actually belongs to Vigil. Given Vigil's decidedly underwhelming performance for a six-star Operator, this may have been done on purpose, and the sheer number of comments on the YouTube video flat-out denying Vigil's existence definitely supports the idea.
• Myrtle
  • "DP printer go brrr!"^ExplanationA snowclone of the "Money printer go brrr!" meme. When Myrtle debuted, she was bar none the best DP generator in the game by a huge margin (until Elysium was added, with him being equally if not more broken, and later on, Saileach as a 6-star Standard Bearer who offers fantastic support to go with her DP generation), thus spawning meme edits where Reunion forces, or sometimes other, less powerful DP battery Vanguards like Siege or Texas, display a combination of jealousy and rage towards her for her extreme utility.
• Nearl (the Radiant Knight)
  • Masochist Nearl^ExplanationFans have noted how Nearl bears a resemblance to Darkness, and with Nearl being a Defender, many jokes were made.
  • Nearl is the NTR Knight^ExplanationFans quickly realised that Nearl the Radiant Knight's title easily turns into the acronym NTR. Cue a bunch of darkly off-colour jokes about it.
• Orchid
  • Orchid being a creepy Stalker without a Crush^ExplanationThe way Recruitment works is that it will try to give you the operator of lowest possible rarity who also fits many of the criteria you've set beforehand. Due to her being the only 3-star Supporter, you'll be seeing Orchid a lot, short of being blessed with the ultra-rare Senior or Top Operator tags. Players have taken to labeling her as a stalker who would rather spend time bothering the Doctor than handling her own squad. Considering their chaotic nature, however, you can't really blame her for that.
• Passenger
  • That tickles^ExplanationDuring his initial release, many fans quipped that this is the general response of anyone that Passenger tries to harm with his lightning Arts, owing to his mediocre ATK and bad damage modifiers for his skills during gameplay; his S3 in particular looks flashy and flamboyant, but having a combination of random targetting, low duration, and a very poor damage scaling for his already low ATK makes it deal laughable amounts of damage to enemies. After he got his buffs and Module, this meme has come to a close.
  • Passenger can't kill slugs^ExplanationOne of the jokes that contributed to Passenger's Memetic Loser status is how he cannot kill the large hordes of Originium Slugs with one cast of his S3 in LS-4, which isn't helped by his kit suffering from various deficiencies that contributes to his Low-Tier Letdown status. Technically speaking, he normally doesn't have trouble fighting against these low-tier mobs when they come in small numbers, but the fault is rather in the mechanics of his third skill: the way his S3 works is that within its duration of four seconds, it will attack one enemy every half second, and will randomly switch to a different target afterwards; thing is, because there are so many of them in that particular wave and said skill is not exactly designed against huge swarms, this resulted in the damage being spread far too thinly, often needing to fire off his skill a second time to just barely stop them before they escape. Ironically, his S2 is the ideal skill against the slug army despite the weaker damage mod, due to applying consistent damage over a much longer duration. After his buffs, however, Passenger is actually able to kill the slugs by himself, making this a thing of the past.
  • Passenger buff when?^ExplanationAfter his, ahem, spectacular performance and reception from fans, many players responded that he needs to be buffed, some dismissing it as a joke, since Hypergryph has never released balance patches to completely rework operator kits. Surprisingly, the joke died quickly with the announcment and subsequent implementation of Chain Caster buffs in the Dossoles Holiday event, including a buff to Passenger which, while not exactly the biggest, did manage to salvage him to a degree. His Modules introduced since Near Light manages to completely save him.
  • I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING^ExplanationAfter his buffs, Passenger is now able to actually perform significantly more competently than he did before, and his Modules escalate his performance even further. However, some fans have exaggerated the strengths of his buffs along with the accompanying gameplay to Memetic Badass levels, particularly in videos showcasing his post-buff gameplay and his surprisingly good performance in Contingency Contract #6: Wild Scales and Integrated Strategies 2 (like in this demonstration video), with some joking that he is way too strong now.
• Penance
  • >.< ^ExplanationThe release of Penance's Icefield Messenger outfit portrays Lavinia when she's drunk, with noticeably sillier and more lighthearted skill animations, especially her S1 which has her make a ">.<" face when swinging her weapon. The sheer contrast of the normally serious and dignified judge versus the flushed and tipsy lady off the clock was deemed by many players to be absolutely adorable.
• Perfumer
  • Perfumer's mop.^ExplanationPerfumer's "Species Plantarum" skin changes the graphics of her staff to what seems like a floor mop. Some crafty fan artists have even visualized her healing her allies as Perfumer just mopping the shit out of them to restore their HP.
• Platinum
  • Platinum can't use an ab roller.^ExplanationDuring a September 2022 episode of the Japanese variety show GuruNai, Honda Hitomi of AKB48 made an appearence cosplaying as Platinum, where she performed a cheerleading routine and attempted to do stretches with an ab roller, only to give up immediately twice in a row. This second clip proved especially popular, and resulted in plenty of fanart of Platinum, roller in hands, collapsed face-first on the ground in utter defeat.
• Podenco
  • Podenco's War Crimes^ExplanationPodenco's S2 has her use vials of plant matter and spores as weapons to slow and silence enemies. Coupled with her comments about gardening when watching Training Records, and her remarks about weeding when in battle, fans soon decided that using her S2 in battle was either biological or chemical warfare and technically a war crime. Her soft personality and reputation as The Cutie only adds to the jokes.
• Poncirus
  • PONcirus^ExplanationWhen Poncirus hit global servers and her backstory was translated, her lore portrayed her a Cosmic Plaything with inexplicably and often impossibly bad luck in every regard, with her messing up almost anything she does due to sheer misfortune. Players quickly started poking fun of it by emphasizing the "pon" in Poncirus' name, with "pon" being short for "ponkotsu", a Japanese term referring to a clumsy/useless character.
• Popukar
  • Popukar is Big Bob's daughter.^ExplanationBecause both Popukar and Big Bob use chainsaws as weapons and Popukar looks like a little girl, some fans began joking that she's actually his daughter.
• Projekt Red
  • Projekt Red just wants to touch fluffy tails^Explanation It's noted in universe that Projekt Red has a reputation that causes the other Lupo operators, Texas, Provence, and Lappland, to avoid her at all costs. Projekt Red herself states that she doesn't mean them any harm and simply wants to touch their tails, so it isn't uncommon for fan artists to jokingly depict her as making the other Lupos uncomfortable by staring longingly at their tails from a distance. Red's module is shown to had a fluff ball accessory included and even mentions it in the lore attached to the module, making this meme canon.
  • "Mofumofu"^ExplanationA Japanese word that implies fluffiness. It has since been associated with any fanmade stuff about Red following the above meme context. Or if Red is depicted around others' tails, expect a user to bring this term.
  • Red just wants to have friends^ExplanationProjekt Red is typically depicted as a very lonely child who just wants to make a lot of friends. However, her status as The Dreaded among Lupos means she's effectively ostracized by her own kind. Cuora of all people is frequently presented as her Only Friend, for some reason.
• Proviso
  • "Wat?"^ExplanationProviso's Throw It In! "Tap" English voiceline became well known for her, endearingly, particular way of saying the aforementioned word out.
• Ptilopsis
  • "Error/Erā hase!"^ExplanationThis is Ptilopsis' voice line when she's tapped in the base without a Trust bubble. Coupled with the also-memetic pose she makes at the same time, fans have basically turned it into her Catchphrase in the vein of "Does not compute!" whenever the Doctor makes Ptilopsis flustered.
  • Under the Doctor's desk. / UnderTable^{Explanation (Warning: NSFW)}One artist drew artwork of Blue Poison offering the Doctor cake, while Ptilopsis is under the desk doing exactly what you may imagine. Originally started in the Chinese fandom (when a forum took a long time to delete the image), this oddly specific situation became the subject of frequent jokes across the general fan community.
    • This meme became so infamous that it got parodied by Alph with a bait-and-switch gag.
  • Tea Applesauce.^ExplanationThe voiceover of a video by Watch Mojo incorrectly pronounces Ptilopsis's name as "Ti-opl-sis". While far from the only mispronunciation in their videos, this one proved the most notorious, with fans bastardising it further into "Tea Applesauce" and adopting it as a jokey nickname for her.
• Reed (the Flameshadow)
  • Reed the Flameshadow is a "Medic"^ExplanationWhen Reed the Flameshadow made a debut in the Chinese server at December 15 2022, showcases of Reed the Flameshadow shows her third skill capable of nuking enemies piling up ala Chain Casters. Cue jokes and memes of Reed actually being a new Chain Caster instead of an Incantation Medic spreading around the fanbase.
    • Reed says Explosion ^ExplanationThe chain of explosion effect from Reed the Flameshadow's S3 brought a surge of KonoSuba jokes from a subset of the fandom
  • Refd the Flame Shadow^ExplanationThe News announcement of her banner initially had a glaring typo of her name, which some players jokingly took as the shorthand for Reed's Alternate form. The typo has since been fixed.
  • Unfortunately for you, Dokutah, you are maidenless.^ExplanationReed's English VA is Martha Mackintosh, who voiced Melina in Elden Ring. The "maiden" jokes quickly wrote themselves.
  • Reed, the Flame of Razgriz ^ExplanationAce Combat fans drew some amusing parallels between Reed's backstory and the legend of Razgriz. One of her event songs, Fire and Ash, was edited with Ace Combat sound effects to drive home home the comparisons. In-story, her sister Eblana even pulls a Pixy and asks her if she "has found a reason to live yet", the only thing missing when she asked that question being a riff of flamenco guitars in the vein of Zero.
• Roberta
  • Roberta asserting her dominance^ExplanationRoberta just so happens to do a cute little T-pose when tapped in the base, which quickly led to quips and fanarts depicting her as a T-poser due to the memetic status of said pose. When her Summer Flowers skin revealed that her T-pose was replaced with a different pose, fans are quick to jokingly despair over the loss. Thankfully, her second skin, "Granter of Colors", brought the T-pose back, to the rejoice of many.
• Rosmontis
  • Rosmontis the Bank Robber^ExplanationBoth Shiroko from Blue Archive and Rosmontis herself have the same appearance with soft-spoken nature voiced by Yui Ogura, with jokes about Rosmontis adopting Shiroko's odd hobby of planning bank robbery and associated with people sharing the same voice actresses accompanying Shiroko for that (namely Ifrit/Hoshino, Angelina/Serika and Suzuran/Hifumi). Interestingly, Jessica (as the Liberated) was also involved in a bank robbery during the event of Come Catastrophes or Wakes of Vultures.
• Saga
  • NATTO GOHAN! / ABURAAGE!^ExplanationTwo of Saga's in-combat voice lines are just shouting the names of foods ("natto gohan" being rice with fermented soybeans, and "aburaage" being deep-fried tofu). Combine this with her Big Eater and No Indoor Voice tendencies, along with her very frequent S2 activations, and anything involving Saga will almost certainly bring up either of these two phrases.
• Saria
  • Saria's dad jokes^ExplanationSaria is humorously portrayed in fanon as Ifrit's Bumbling Dad, so a lot of players have also ascribed certain "dad-like" features to her, namely the tendency to make extremely lame or cringeworthy "dad jokes".
  • "Calcification, son!"^ExplanationDuring "Mansfield Break" Saria shows up at the end completely unarmed, and uses her Arts to render her body completely immune to Jesselton's arm-blades, and then beats him down bare-handed. This rather quickly prompted references to Senator Armstrong and his memetic "Nanomachines, son!" line.
• Shaw
  • "Shaw is the one rapper Eminem is afraid to diss!" / "Rap God Shaw"^ExplanationShaw's main Character Tic is her tendency to speak very quickly, some times for minutes on end. Many players joked about how she could make for an incredible rapper, perhaps on or even above he level of Eminem who's already a Motor Mouth himself.
  • "Nospacesrequired"^ExplanationPlayers imitating how Shaw's Motor Mouth trope is applied - as in, there are no spaces all throughout her written dialogue. This is commonly used in Shaw-related, text-based content such as online forums, thread comments or image captions.
• Shining
  • Biker Shining^ExplanationHer second Elite artwork being her drawing a sword out of her staff, horizontally, with the light shines from the blade, in between her hands. It looks like she's riding a bike, especially in the first impression. There's even a photoshop of her actually riding a bike​
• Shu
  • Welcome to the rice fields, motherfucker.^ExplanationShu's S3 involves her trapping enemies in the grassy terrain created by the skill, with them being teleported back into it when they try to leave. Fans immediately associated it with this video of Filthy Frank.​
  • Shu feeding operators rice^ExplanationWith Shu's focus being on farming, and her lore mentioning that the food quality aboard the landship had improved since her arrival, people have taken to drawing fanart of Shu feeding other operators massive amounts of rice
  • The land is flat but she is fertile^ExplanationUnlike her sisters, Shu doesn't exactly have huge... tracts of land, leading to this line being repeated by her fans whenever art or crasser memes about her come up.
• Sideroca
  • Similarly to Amiya being "mistaken" for a donkey, Sideroca is based on a water buffalo, but her massive bust has led to claims she's supposed to be a dairy cow instead.
• Siege
  • "Rainbow Six Siege"^ExplanationOn the topic of video game crossovers, the Siege of Arknights would have crossover memes with that Rainbow Six game, of all things... simply because of the similar "Siege" subtitle. It has later evolved into making crossover fanarts and memes simply because of the similar military themes and Operators using codenames. This gets more used when it's announced that Ubisoft is making a crossover with the game (and with Girls' Frontline). Not helping the association is that Siege wields a hammer, much like the operator Sledge. To further the association, Siege is from Victoria, the equivalent of Britain, and led the Glasgow Gang, which is named for a city in Scotland, while Sledge is a member of the British SAS and is from Scotland.
    • And then there's Operation Originium Dust, the collaboration event between the two.
• Silence (the Paradigmatic)
  • Sleepy Silence^ExplanationDue to Silence's owl Animal Motif, fanartists typically depict her as extremely narcoleptic, and easily falling asleep doing anything, if she's not already been sleeping to begin with.
• SilverAsh
  • "Dokutah! The SilverAsh Bloodline!"^ExplanationSilverAsh, patriarch of the family he is, pressuring the Doctor into marrying either of his sisters (sometimes both) to produce him an heir in order to prevent his (already endangered) bloodline from dying out, often to comically-desperate levels. This is a snowclone of the "Chrisposting" meme from Resident Evil where Chris Redfield similarly pressures Leon Kennedy into marrying and impregnating his sister Claire to continue the bloodline. Note, however, that in the English community, this is a bit of a Discredited Meme due to a combination of overexposure and the fact that SilverAsh never mentions anything remotely related to the topic in canon, although the way he completely trusts Gnosis without reservations during Break The Ice reignited the meme "since he won't be able to continue the bloodline himself with Gnosis" as per the shippers.
    • Chinese players however, interpreted him as an overprotective brother, touching any of his sisters would guarantee an immediate beatdown from him, also to hillarious effect. Poor Courier typically substitutes for the Doctor in such a case, him being shipped with Cliffheart for some reason.
  • SCHWING SCHWING^ExplanationAn onomatopoeia for the sound SilverAsh makes when using his Truesilver Slash skill. The Truesilver Slash is considered so hilariously overpowered that everything related to it has become memetic.
  • This is fine^ExplanationIn BI-6 of "Break the Ice", one event CG◊ shows SilverAsh and Ratatos Browntail casually chatting inside a burning building, done by the latter as a Taking You with Me to the former. Funny enough that it was compared to the namesake meme from Gunshow, but fans started having a field day by photoshopping the image◊ to include more characters sitting down alongside the two, with them also not caring about the situation they're in, similar to an earlier meme involving an event CG from "Near Light".
• Skadi (the Corrupting Heart)
  • Skadi's inner thighs^ExplanationSkadi's character design has two huge cutouts on her leggings that expose a generous portion of each of her inner thighs. Players either worship these, or want to slap them mercilessly.
  • Pro Golfer Skadi^ExplanationSkadi's attack animation has her swinging her BFS like she's driving a golf ball. Observe!
    • This also leads to "Skadig"
  • Skadi sees Magallan as food^ExplanationKiller whales are some of the many natural predators of penguins in reality, thus sparking memes of Magallan being absolutely terrified of Skadi when they meet at Rhodes Island, best described in a fan video. Specter gets to join in on the fun sometimes, too.
  • "No thoughts, head empty"^Explanation Due to her stoicism and questionable decisions like attacking Grani in their event (because she doesn't want them to get screwed by her being the Catastrophe), Skadi is typically presented as permanently spaced-out by the playerbase.
  • "Skadi wants to touch that floff"^Explanation During the anime trailer for the Heart of Surging Flame rerun, Skadi and Provence are shown lying on the beach in their new Coral Coast costumes, with Skadi touching Provence's big tail. This led to jokes about how Skadi loves to touch Provence's fluffy tail. Projekt Red is sometimes involved in these jokes since fans tend to potray her as a tail pervert who wants touch the tails of her fellow Lupos and is jealous that Skadi gets to touch Provence's tail.
  • KYAA SKADI!^ExplanationA particular Facebook user and avid Skadi enthusiast became infamous for posting this phrase alongside a specific gif of a blue cat named Bugcat Capoo (sometimes known as simply Capoo) under every Skadi-related post they could find. Considering that Skadi is considered a significant Ensemble Dark Horse within the community, this phrase (and the associated gif) is now used as an expression of Squee whenever anything praiseworthy involving Skadi occurs.It got so infamous that it spread to other games either by the same name like Scáthach-Skadi or the same seiyuu like Eula.
  • Skadi wins the Doktah Bowl/Chloe is Skadi's daughter ^ExplanationHololive starlet Sakamata Chloe is an Orca girl like Skadi, and has the same styling of white hair with red eyes. Jokes soon sprouted in the shared fandom that Chloe was Skadi's daughter via the Doctor, especially since her mask and hoodie could be taken as her copying her dad's fashion sense.
• Stainless
  • Meet the Engineer ^ExplanationFrom the moment his skills were revealed, Stainless immediately drew comparisons to Team Fortress 2's Engineer due to the Dispenser-like support devices and turret guns he could place on the field. As a result, Stainless tends to attract a lot of Team Fortress 2-related jokes from the fanbase, particularly when he's featured in gameplay videos.
• Surtr
  • Just Surtr It / Just Use Surtr ^ExplanationBecause of her third skill's variety of massive perks that essentially turn her into an immortal killing machine on demand, Surtr quickly became the poster child for no-brain "win button" operators that can trivialize a good chunk of content just by deploying and activating her skill. Expect to see variants of this phrase or abbreviations thereof whenever players talk about content, as well as some mockery of players who are overly reliant on Surtr's game-breaking power in place of strategy. It's also used ironically when describing some of the few situations that Surtr doesn't instantly solve, especially if players used to pointing her at everything get confused about why she isn't working.
  • Surtr being loreless^ExplanationDespite being one of the most popular Operators in the game and a bona fide Game-Breaker to boot, Surtr conspicuously has some of the least lore of not just any 6-star, but any Operator in the game, period. Further excaberating this is that her profile sets up a considerable amount of plot threads, yet none of them have been explored since her release. As this post helpfully points out, as of 1000+ days since her release, Surtr has not gotten a single new word of story, and what story she was released with in her Vignette amounts to only ~450 spoken words (most of which are relatively inconsequential), in a game where most stories have tens of thousands at minimum. This was apparently finally put to rest (at least a tiny bit) with Expeditioner's Joklumarkar giving her a short story in November 2023.
• Suzuran
  • Suzuran: Ultimate FLOOF^ExplanationSuzuran has nine tails, being based on a nine-tailed fox. Naturally, the fanbase was very quick to comment how Projekt Red would enter heaven upon merely seeing the adorable Vulpo girl.
  • "Miss Suzuran is our light. Miss Suzuran is what keeps us going."^ExplanationSuzuran's profile is chock-full of enamored Rhodes Island members praising her to an almost comically exaggerated degree, including using the two aforementioned phrases. Considering her Moe appeal in and out-of-universe (even her voice actress can't help but fawn over her and her CV comment in the CN 2nd Anniversary had her quoting this exact line), discussions about Suzuran or fan art will often have at least one of these lines quoted.
• Tachanka
  • Tachankaface^ExplanationFollowing in Thorns' tradition, players have immediately began photoshopping the head of Tachanka's chibi sprite onto every possible thing they can find, due to how dorky his character model looks in-game. Whereas Thornsfacing is limited to character CGs, Tachanka's helmet goes onto everything, but typically inanimate objects.
  • "Lord Tachanka!"^ExplanationAfter a collab event with Rainbow Six Siege was announced in 2021, players have immediately started spreading word and jokes about Spetsnaz Defense operator Tachanka, due to his legendary status in the Siege fanbase as a Fountain of Memes and a Memetic Badass. If anything, the developers are more than aware of how this moniker of his is adored by fans; the word "Lord" can be seen written via bullets on the background of Tachanka's Elite 2 artwork, while his unlockable skin is named "Lord" - taken from the story of the Siege collaboration where he saves a feudal lord alongside the rest of Team Rainbow and accepts payment with the lord's medieval helmet instead of any monetary compensation.
• Tequila
  • Tequila Joseph^ExplanationWhen the welfare operator of "Dossoles Holiday" was revealed to be named "Tequila", it didn't take long for people to make jokes pertaining to Joseph Joestar's attempt at disguising himself as a lady in order to infiltrate a Nazi camp in Battle Tendency.
  • Money laundering ^ExplanationTequila's base skill "Investment" grants the player bonus LMD whenever he handles a Trading Post order for four bars of Pure Gold. Because of his often shady behaviour and background in Dossoles, along with just plain Rule of Funny, fans like to claim Tequila's secretly securing these extra funds though criminal activity.
• Texas (the Omertosa)
  • Texas' Unwanted Harem^ExplanationTexas is often joked to be an chick magnet by fans. Largely thanks to fandom exaggerating Lappland's Stalker without a Crush tendencies, Sora's dialogue (which mostly consists of her showing interest in Texas), and with Exusiai as she almost always appears together with her in the story.
  • Evil Texas ^ExplanationThe antagonist of Lingering Echoes, Dame Gertrude, heavily resembles Texas the Omertosa in appearance and dress sense. This naturally resulted in jokes around her being an evil Texas clone, and her appearance - particularly the way her dress accentuates her massive bust - created a surge of Perverse Sexual Lust, and lamentation over her wickedness and eventual death. Ironically, Gertrude made her first appearance long before Texas the Omertosa even debuted, with people only starting making jokes and comparing Gertrude to Texas alter (instead of the other way around) when Lingering Echoes is released on Global servers after Il Siracusano was released on CN servers.
  • "Shut up."^ExplanationTexas' English voice became well-known within the Global community, as one of her battle lines is to say the exact line, which can interrupt another Operator's dialogue mid-combat (bonus points if the lines are lengthy), especially if they are also voiced in EN. Cue jokes of Texas being a jerk to the other Operators by telling them to shut up.
• Thorns
  • Thornsface^ExplanationAfter Thorns' artwork was released, people very quickly realized he was drawn by Huànxiàng Hēi Tù, the artist responsible for the already-popular Lappface meme (see above), making him more or less a slightly more masculine version of Texas. This quickly spirals into fanartists photoshopping his face onto every female operator they can find, complete with tanning their skin brown to match his face, starting with the Penguin Logistics lot, and per community consensus, Thorns actually makes for a pretty damn attractive woman as well. After a few months, it became something of a fandom tradition to "Thornsify" every operator immediately after their announcement, regardless of gender.
    • Karin, the canon Thornsification^ExplanationThe fellow Yostar-published mobile game Blue Archive features a character named Kakudate Karin, whose face, dark skintone, and golden eyes are all strikingly reminicent of Thorns. With how widespread Thornsification edits had become, the Arknights fans couldn't let this one go.
  • "Thorns" in You ^{Explanation (Warning: NSFW!)}When the name of Texas the Omertosa's character song was revealed, many players were quick to point out how there is already a playable operator named Thorns, the resident powerful Jack of All Trades Lord archetype guard. The hilarity of the Accidental Innuendo and Double Entendre in the name has caused a surge of NSFW jokes circling around the fandom regarding him and how he is committing the deed to either Elysium or the players via the Doctor.
  • Kore koso Iberia no Destreza! ^Explanation One of Thorns' skill activation lines (in the Japanese dub), most associated with his S3 because it is the skill that makes him a powerful operator capable of doing almost anything. You have to activate S3 twice to get its full benefit- unlimited duration + twice the bonuses of the first activation- thus people hear this line a lot, leading to it becoming a meme.
• Toddifons
  • Racist Toddifons^ExplanationToddifons's talent lets her deal increased damage against Sarkaz enemies and her first skill prioritizes attacking them, which caused a joke that she has a burning hatred for Sarkaz. Funnily enough, this actually isn't too far off from the truth, since her family historically had many conflicts with the Sarkaz and thus instilled anti-Sarkaz warfare techniques into their everday discipline. Her module upgrades further amplifying the damage she does to Sarkaz foes quickly made the meme evolve into Advanced Racism.
• Tomimi
  • Thicc Tomimi^ExplanationUpon the introduction of 5* Caster Operator Tomimi, many fans noticed her thick crocodile tail, which is much bigger than fellow Archosauria Gavial. Cue jokes and fanart that focuses on her thicc tail.
  • "Naughty little whelps get tail spankings!"^ExplanationWhen Gavial learns that Tomimi was the one who shot down the aircraft at the start of The Great Chief Returns to prevent her from leaving, she spanks her on the tail to punish her. This scene has proven ripe material for parodies and fanart, with frequent jokes that considering how Tomimi feels about Gavial, she probably wouldn't consider it much of a punishment.
  • Tomimi refuses to respect newer Doctors.^ExplanationThe rerun of Gavial the Great Chief Returns had a bug that made the medal "Tomimi's Respect" unobtainable for Doctors who only acquired her at that point (and the bugfix only came after that rerun was over).
• Totter
  • Totter defeating the Black Knight. ^ExplanationWhen Break the Ice was rerun following Totter's implementation, Doctors who had raised him found that his True Sight, increased damage against invisible targets, and long range allowing him to safely attack from outside of Momentum Murder's area of effect all made him an ideal choice for dealing with Degenbrecher's second phase. The fact that Totter, a 4★ operator with a limp and vision problems, was going toe-to-toe with an undefeated Living Legend and winning was not lost on the fanbase, and became the subject of memes.
• U-Official
  • "Brain-fu-"/Language U-Official^ExplanationWhile the official script says "brain-far-", those who only heard by ear (and the way she says it) resembles an F-word. Coincidentally, her English voice actress, LilyPichu, voices a Roomba that consists of spouting out expletives.
• Valarqvin
  • New tall mommy finally dropped!!! ^ExplanationValarqvin stands at 188 cm, becoming the new tallest female operator in the game, beating out Hoshiguma whose height was unchallenged since the game's launch. She quickly endeared herself to fans with her dark, elegant, and beautiful design similar to Gladiia; bonus points for being an actual (adoptive) mommy.
• Virtuosa
  • Arturia causing people to distort. ^ExplanationArturia's character revolves around her obsession with emotions and desire for all people to fully express their hearts and live without regrets, leading to her using her music Arts to release people's inhibitions and cause them to act on their most suppressed desires, causing no end of problems. Due to the Friendly Fandoms between the Arknights and Project Moon fanbases, fans noted that this is almost exactly how Lobotomy Corporation's Carmen, at least as of Library of Ruina where she has become an omnipresent "voice", is obsessed with expression of the true self and incites the City's inhabitants into embracing their deepest desires, causing their transformations into Distortions or awakening their E.G.O.. As an added bonus, both are dark-haired women closely related to a male counterpart who is sometimes pragmatic to a fault, and Project Moon's games already have no shortage of music-themed characters associated with insanity or loss of inhibition.
• W
  • Turning W's sprite upside down and calling it "M". Self-explanatory, really.
  • W and Adnachiel^ExplanationAfter the announcement of W being a recruitable operator and spy for Rhodes Island, many players have taken to joking about the awkwardness of her running into Adnachiel after the Curb-Stomp Battle she dealt to him in 1-11, usually with W being a Comedic Shotacon looking for round two, of what you could probably imagine.
  • Minion W^ExplanationA new meme spawned after W's Epoque skin was released. While set as the Assistant on the main menu screen, W's sprite can be freely moved around to the player's desire. If the player is at exactly level 100 and W is wearing her Epoque skin, which puts her into a sitting position, her CG can be moved just behind the numbers such that the two zeroes look like very thick-rimmed Nerd Glasses, giving her a look comparable to the Minions.
  • "The Revolver Ocelot of Arknights"^{Explanation (Spoilers for both this game and Metal Gear)}After the release of Darknights' Memoir, fans began to notice a startling number of parallels between W and Revolver Ocelot, not only the reveal that she's a triple agent feigning allegiance to both Reunion and Theresis to further her own agenda but also her infatuation with and Undying Loyalty towards Theresa mirroring Ocelot's own feelings towards Big Boss. Considering Ocelot is a major Fountain of Memes himself, it's not uncommon for fans of both series to reference him when talking about W.
  • W_Dance^ExplanationAK fan animator Harlequin-Wheels made a small animation of W dancing in his Operation Lead Seal animation that became a memetic sensation, particularly once it was paired with a sped-up version of "See Tình" by Vietnamese singer Hoàng Thuỳ Linh, itself a popular meme on TikTok. Eventually, it grew popular enough for Wheels to release a sequel, wdance_2, complete with an isolated GIF of her dance for easier editing.
  • Cockroach^ExplanationThe antennae-like shape of the red hairs on W's head, along with her horns being pointed down rather than up like other Sarkaz and her seeming inability to die no matter what gets thrown at her, led to jokes about her looking more like a cockroach than a demon, prompting the nickname.
  • W is the only Arknights character who can say fuck.^ExplanationAs of Episode 13, there are only two uncensored f-bombs in the game's English script, both of which are dropped by W. This observation has led to jokes that she's the only character allowed to say "fuck" in the whole setting.
  • Gee, W! How come Hypergryph lets you have TWO limiteds?^{Explanation (spoilers)}As of Episode 14, W has received a second limited alter version, Wiš'adel, as a Flinger Sniper. This has led to jokes over W being the clear favorite of the developers.
• Waai Fu
  • I'm not a furry, but...^ExplanationFans of Waai Fu joke they're not into furries but make an exception for her since she's rather sexy and attractive for a furry girl. Saw a resurgence when Mountain was released.
• Whislash
  • Auntie Whislash- I-I mean Big Sister Zofia!!!^ExplanationWhislash is the aunt of Nearl and Blemishine, but since she's only a few years older than them she prefers to be referred to as an older sister instead, and will cause anyone to regret making her feel old.
• Zima
  • Gopnik Zima^ExplanationThe Ursus people themselves are based upon the typical Russians, with Zima especially fitting into the Husky Russkie stereotype, sans You No Take Candle speech patterns. Of the current Ursus students, Zima is rude, crude, and doesn't give a rat's ass what others think, just like your typical gopnik, and is commonly drawn as one in fanarts. And lo and behold, she even squats in her first new outfit, and carries around a boombox that's constantly blasting (presumably) hardbass when at base. This was later confirmed in the English translation of the Obsidian Festival event. Zima explicitly says she likes hardbass in the D.D.D. social media log◊.

Memes shared with multiple Operators

• Replacing Shirayuki's oversized shuriken and Hoshiguma's shield with a fidget spinner.^ExplanationShirayuki's three-pronged shuriken is jokingly described as a huge fidget spinner, due to its, well, spinning motion when thrown. This is especially observable if Shirayuki uses her second skill, as the shuriken will hover and spin in place, and Hoshiguma's skill where her shield spins to buzzsaw her enemies.
• *Lungmen Swearing/Slang* (*龙门粗口*) ^ExplanationAt the beginning of "Necessary Solutions", Ch'en and Swire argue at each other when Swire criticizes Ch'en for not doing her job when the L.G.D. headquarters are being occupied by Reunion, which Ch'en rebukes as per her aloof and dismissive nature. In the Chinese and Japanese versions of the game, the argument involves both of them saying certain "exotic" words, hence the aforementioned Cluster Bleep-Bomb or censorship using the phrase "*龙门粗口*". Chinese players decided to take this one step further by flanderizing Ch'en (and to a lesser extent, Swire) into a foul-mouthed character. Again, this meme is acknowledged in the official English translation of "Code of Brawl" and "Partial Necrosis", where some NPCs use these words.
• We Bare Bears edits^ExplanationThis is a popular meme edit trend spawning from bilibili, where users would place the faces of chibi operator sprites on top of characters in We Bare Bears, with the protagonists being "played" by Zima, FEater, and Rosa (Istina prior to Rosa's release), respectively.
• "DeepThroat"^ExplanationMaking a portmanteau from Deepcolor and GreyThroat's names or combining them into one character just to mention this term.
• Botan Shishiro is Siege and SilverAsh's daughter^ExplanationAfter the debut of Botan Shishiro, viewers have immediately noticed the uncanny resemblance between her and her so-called "parents", sharing the lion Animal Motifs with Siege, complete with poofy hair, and SilverAsh's white fur color and preference for black clothing.
• Hungry 6-star doggos^ExplanationWith the release of Saga and her being revealed as a Big Eater just like Ceobe before her, fans have noticed that the first two 6* Perro operators are obsessed with food, often depicting them as having an Odd Friendship despite not interacting during the story.
• Mizuki and Goldenglow are brother and sister.^ExplanationNamie, the artist behind both Mizuki and Goldenglow, talks about the two of them as if they're siblings despite them having no official connection to each other in-story. The community ran with this, and the two of them regularly appear together in fanart acting Like Brother and Sister.
  • Do.. Do you want to be jellyfish food?^ExplanationMany fans jokingly stated Namie would threaten anyone by feeding them to Mizuki or he'll personally do it himself for calling Goldenglow a dog or hurting her. Humorously, the person she's threatening is alchemaniac, Skadi's official artist.
• Male Tourist B and Female Tourist C^ExplanationThe names given to Big Bob and Ch'en, respectively, during their cameos in "Heart of Surging Flame". Despite their portraits blatantly being, well, Big Bob and Ch'en, the game refuses to acknowledge them. Female Tourist C jokes in particular saw a second wind after the addition of "Ch'en the Holungday", a beach-themed variant of Ch'en in the outfit she wore to the Obsidian Festival.
• "Can we have playable Black Knight?" "We have playable Blacknight at home." ^ExplanationLong before she was announced as a playable character in The Rides to Lake Silberneherze, fans were already clamouring for Degebrecher to join Rhodes Island due to the near-legendary reputation she'd built up as the Black Knight in the Kazimierz Major storyline and her appearance as the final boss of Break the Ice. The very next event, Invitation to Wine, would then introduce an unrelated Savra bounty hunter known as "Blacknight" as a new Vanguard operator, prompting those fans to lament that this wasn't the Black Knight they were asking for. Became a Discredited Meme now that Degenbrecher has been released in The Rides to Lake Silbenherze.

Factions

• Abyssal Hunters
  • The Rivalry of Ulpianus and Gladiia ^ExplanationFans quickly decided that Ulpianus the Abyssal Hunter, as Skadi's superior, had a running rivalry with Gladiia, and were quick to express it in fanart and fancomics, where he would take Skadi's side and support her whenever she got outvoted by Gladiia and Laurentina. The in-story CG of Gladiia and Ulpianus confronting each other with distinct "Oh? You're approaching me?" vibes during Stultifera Navis only cemented this, as did his concern that Skadi not return to Aegiran territory due to all the Church of the Deep Cultists eager to take advantage of her current condition as a living vessel for the lifeblood of Ishar-Mla.
• Karlan Trade Company
  • The Silverash family biting their own tails. ^ExplanationSilverAsh, Cliffheart and Pramanix are all part snow leopard, a large cat species infamous for biting their own tails◊. This has led to common fan portrayal of them biting their own tails. Acknowleged in the manga anthology chapter "A Karlan Teatime", where SilverAsh bites his tail in sadness when he thinks his sisters refuse to have tea time with him.
  • Degenbrecher's dangerous horns. ^ExplanationAs of the official "Sharp Blade, Silver Edge" Prelude Suite manga where Degenbrecher carelessly and narrowly avoids striking an irate Gnosis with her horn, the CN fandom has depicted her constantly accidentally or intentionally bullying Gnosis and/or Silverash as well by hitting them with her horns, often upside the head, just by turning to look at something.
• Reunion
  • Reunion has the best waifus ^{Explanation (Spoilers!)}W, Frostnova and Mudrock were popular among the fanbase for being Draco in Leather Pants especially when Mudrock turns out to be an attractive girl underneath her bulky suit. While Frostnova sadly died before she could officially join Rhodes Island, the other two were able to join Rhodes Island as operators.
• Rhine Lab
  • Arduino ^Explanation A name for the Rhine Lab group, as their logo resembles the Arduino logo without the gap and flipped 180 degrees horizontally.
  • The Rhine Lab Family ^ExplanationDue to their complicated relationships, Silence, Saria, and Ifrit are typically treated as a family unit by fans, with Ptilopsis, Mayer, and Magallan being considered the honorary aunts. Saria is typically depicted as a comically-Bumbling Dad with tenuous grasp on common sense and a Henpecked Husband rolled into one. Appropriate for the situation, Saria is often depicted as teaching Ifrit all the wrong things, absentmindedly injuring her, or a combination of both, which Silence responds to by having her sleep on the couch or some other manner of comical punishments.
  • Comparing Ptilopsis and Silence to the Kemono Friends owls ^ExplanationThe first season of the Kemono Friends anime featured a pair of owl Friends who acted as researchers, one of whom is based on the northern white-faced owl, the same species as Ptilopsis, and the other is coloured brown like Silence. This led to jokes about them being related, or even the same characters, as well as fanart of both pairs interacting or cosplaying as one another.

NPCs

• Ace
  • "This place Ace so hot!"^{Explanation (spoilers!)}Basically, puns that connect fire or heat-related words to Ace, as a reference to Talulah killing him. Talulah herself has fire-based abilities.
• Big Bob:
  • FREE BIG BOB ^ExplanationOne of the encounters in Mizuki & Caerula Arbor has you run into a beer hawker who reveals that Big Bob got arrested by the Columbian tax bureau and is currently serving time in jail. The fandom, filled with mock outrage from this Happy Ending Override, declared this to be the darkest part of Caerula Arbor and began calling for Rhodes Island to stage a jailbreak, while others simply took to making tax fraud-related memes about him as with Ambriel before him.
• Closure
  • Closure sucks our wallets dry. ^ExplanationUnlike Warfarin (who seems to be fascinated with blood), Closure is often joked to like machine oil more, according to Warfarin's lines. This would make her a different kind of a vampire. But for some players, Closure is joked to be addicted to money because she is the resident shopkeeper of Arknights.
• Crownslayer
  • "CrownSlayer bully"^ExplanationThe Reunion boss CrownSlayer's main shtick is her ability to completely disregard blocking and sneak past your Defenders. This is where Push-type Specialists like the aforementioned Shaw come in, whose special abilities can shove her in several different directions, making them effectively impossible for her to sneak past. In certain maps, this can be exploited to mess with her AI, such as the infamous 4-4 Shaw solo, or instakill her by pushing her into pits. Pull Specialists like Rope and Cliffheart are also popular CS bullies, since their skills jostle her in a different manner, though they are far more situational compared to Pushers like Shaw or FEater.
  • CrownSlayer bullying herself^ExplanationFor her appearance on CC Pyrite, thanks to her jacked-up weight stat, she is now less vulnerable to bullying...or so you thought. With some clever strategy, you can make CrownSlayer bully herself by trapping her in a loop of glitching through a wall.
• Doctor
  • The Doctor devolving into a raving lunatic when the player use up their current Sanity pool^Explanation​In this game, in-game stamina is called "​sanity", so the Doctor is often depicted literally going insane once they run out. Players often joke that they'​re losing their real-life sanity while challenging some particularly frustating stages, too.​
  • This meme is acknowledged by the game itself, too, as Episode 7 has Kal'tsit musing about what Doctor is capable of doing during the moment of insanity.
  • The CN community has another variant of labeling the Doctor with the 0 Sanity interface from the game, and depicting them with absurd decision-making choices. One translated comic can be seen here.
  • The Doctor being an Extreme Omnivore^ExplanationMany players have taken guesses at what happens to enemies when they enter objectives, since the Doctor doesn't seem to be any worse for wear even if a foe gets in. Cue memes and fanart about how the Doctor single-handedly kills all the foes that leak, or more popularly, eats them alive. With the fact that Vanilla expresses concern about the Doctor eating her pet slugs in "Stories of Afternoon" (and notes that they already have a reputation for eating bizarre things behind Kal'tsit's back), this interpretation may or may not have become an Ascended Meme.
  • The Doctor's unusual way of eating instant noodles offhandedely mentioned in Episode 7 (read: pouring boiling water into their mouth with the uncooked noodles inside) has become memetic, to the point where it's often considered their primary character trait in fanworks. Shirayuki observing the Doctor do this during her Operator Record only added to the jokes, as she described it as "genius". Often comparisons to the Boss Noodles ad are made, like with this animated short by Harlequin-Wheels.
  • "Dokutah Crossovers"^ExplanationSimply put, this game's Doctor has crossover memes, jokes, and fanarts with fellow doctors from other games, as a sign of having Friendly Fandoms. Some examples include The Medic from Team Fortress 2, Dr. Romani Archaman from Fate/Grand Order, the Doctor class from Granblue Fantasy, and Dr. Alex Mercer from [PROTOTYPE].
  • Doctor consults KyostinV for advice.^ExplanationAs PRTS is represented in the anime as a smartphone-like device, edits were made to joke they're just watching the Youtuber on it to copy all his tactics as a first-time player.
  • Anime Doctor vs. Game Dokutah ^ExplanationWhen the anime began airing, memes cropped up comparing its more serious portrayal of the Doctor with the goofy Bunny-Ears Lawyer they're often depicted as by the fans. These often involved the latter employing game logic to come up with nonsensical solutions to problems the former handled in more realistic ways.
  • Who's the Old Well now, huh?!^{Explanation (MASSIVE spoilers!)}A lot of fans like to portray the Doctor poking fun at Kal'tsit's very old age (over 10,000 years old). Then "Lonetrail" reveals that the Doctor has also been around for an extremely long time, and is at least 13,000 years old. Jokes were immediately made involving Kal'tsit turning the Old Well jokes against them, with lots of mockery.
  • Dr. Pipimi^ExplanationIn the anime adaptation, Arknights: Prelude to Dawn, Doctor was drawn with a slender figure that is rather uncanny. Initially, fans begins to joke that the true identity of Doctor is actually Pipimi from Pop Team Epic, whose build fits the depiction in the anime. Immediately became Hilarious in Hindsight when the first episode was aired, since when the fifth episode of Pop Team Epic's second season was aired (one day after the anime), the female voice actor of the week for Pipimi shared the same voice actor with Doctor.
  • You're telling me I have to fight this? ^{Explanation (Spoilers for the second expansion of Integrated Strategies 4!)}This originated from a fanart that references a Pokémon Sun and Moon meme over a Rowlett staring at the trainer as Player takes on Totem Raticate. The fourth ending of Integrated Strategies 4 has players fight two legendary rulers, the Nightzmoran khagan Kharanduu Khan and the Aslan monarch Lugalszargus, at the same time. Unlike the Playwright or Izumik from the previous iterations, the bosses prove to be gigantic in shape and they spend much of the fight trying to kill each other while also taking out any Operators you deploy to handle the Mooks that appear alongside them in the map, with high chances that your Operators can also get killed in the crossfire. Add that onto the very specific requisites needed to be done to even access this ending (such as needing to pay a hefty price via Hope or Originium ingots lest you get a -4 deployment penalty after you obtain a specific collectible that costs only 1 ingot in Cannot Goodenough's shop), cue players joking how they are unprepared and ask Hypergryph how are they supposed to be able to defeat the gigantic fearful dual bosses.
  • "Are we the baddies?" ^{Explanation (Massive Spoilers!)}The Doctor's shady past as the "Ghost of Babel" and some of the questionable things they can do in-game (such as the fielding of child soldiers and usage of highly unethical weapons) already gives them a fandom reputation as a war criminal, but then Babel dropped the lore that the pre-amnesia Doctor was not only responsible for the creation of Originium, but were actively facilitating a plan to have it consume all of Terra in order to save their race, to the point where they genuinely betrayed Theresa and orchestrated her death because her goal of curing Oripathy opposed their own. The only reason why they aren't considered as much of a threat in the present day is that they developed empathy and love for Terra which overwhelmed them with guilt when they tried to continue the plan, prompting Theresa to perform a mind wipe in the hopes that they could embrace their kinder self if only not burdened by expectations from the Precursors.
• Jesselton
  • Jesselton "Jeston" Miller Williams^ExplanationThe Global release of "Mansfield Break" notably used several different translations of Jesselton's name. People have made jokes about the name inconsistencies being his multiple undercover names or his real name actually being that long, while others make it even longer for fun.
  • "NANOMACHINES, SON!"^ExplanationJesselton's Arts let him control iron, which he uses in tandem with metal plates beneath his skin to form metal constructs around his body or - most notably - selectively harden parts of his body to block attacks. People immediately compared this ability to Senator Armstrong's infamous nanomachines, as they're visually and functionally similar.
• Lemuen
  • Getting Over It with Lemuen ^explanationMany jokes were made around the speculation of just how Lemuen managed to get her wheelchair up onto a street sign to get a vantage point to snipe Andoain's Guardian Gun and disarm him.
• Logos
  • Logos, champion of the Rhodes Island office stool racing circuit.^ExplanationAccording to the description of the White Round Stool furniture item, Scout and Logos once used them to hold a race, with Logos the victor. The idea that the mysterious Banshee One-Man Army who saved the lives of the Mudrock Squad wasn't above goofing off with his Elite Operator co-workers really stuck with the fandom, to the point where when he finally made his onscreen debut in Episode 11, some of the first fanart he received was of him riding around on one of those stools.
  • Low Tier Logos / Logos Tier God^{Explanation (spoilers for Episode 12)}Throughout Episode 12, Logos and the Damazti Cluster discuss the monotony of the Cluster's life and how they desperately crave a new experience. Logos then correctly assumes that the Damazti has Nothing Left to Do but Die and encourages them to follow through with their desire. Due to a combination of their conversation and the Cluster empathizing with Golding's recent suicide, the Damazti actually decides to listen to him and let itself die for real. The fact that Logos technically kills an immortal Sarkaz lord by telling it to kill itself and succeeding was not lost on fans, in particular drawing comparison to the streamer LowTierGod's infamous rant.
• Patriot
  • Patriot is CrownSlayer 2.0 ^ExplanationOn release, Patriot was That One Boss, an incredibly difficult opponent that scared many people. However as time passed, people soon wised up to his incredibly simple patterns and soon countless videos and stories of beating him with ease flew about. Made even worse with the introduction of newer operators (especially Surtr), people have started to use him to test the limits of their new operators. This trope however hit its peak when the anniversary came and introduced Kal'sit and Skadi the Corrupting Heart, where the devs showcased both of their powers by using him as a punching bag. Patriot further hit peak bullied status with the release of Typhon, a Besieger Sniper whose third skill is capable of killing him in both phases without any buffs whatsoever.
  • "Can it kill Patriot?"^ExplanationPatriot in his Marching Stance has 45-60k HP, 2,100 DEF and 90 RES, some of the highest mixed bulk of any enemy in the entire game, so whenever a new Operator is released, they are often pitted against his Marching Stance to see how much damage they deal (often involving copious buffs), with their success rate being considered a major measure of strength for that character, in a similar vein as 'Can it run Doom?'.
• Red
  • Namie approves of Red's relationship with Susie ^ExplanationNamie, as Goldenglow's artist, strongly approved of Red whenever he turned up and saved Susie from her troubles during her livestream where she read the story of A Light Spark in Darkness.
  • Bullying Red with Susie/Red's Revenge/Attempts to lure Red to defect to Rhodes with Susie ^ExplanationCC 12, Operation Basepoint, features the Avenger of Area 59 from the CC Beta as its boss. Jokes soon arose about the Avenger being Red himself (due to the Avenger being referenced in the game's commented code as Reid, the same name Red has acquired in the CN text for A Light Spark in Darkness), with the Contingency Contract being jokingly described as attempts to get Red to come to Rhodes Island to meet Goldenglow again (or get signed on as an operator), and also about having Susie show Red how strong she's gotten since joining Rhodes Island.
• Skullshatterer
  • Skullshatterer's sexy legs^ExplanationDespite being a male, Skullshatterer's artwork shows him having unexpectedly feminine legs. It's something that fans point out as a first impression of him in terms of appearance, and also something that fanarts try to focus more on as a form of fanservice.
• Theresa
  • Homewrecker Theresa/She stole the husband and cat/Arknights has entered the NTR Route ^{Explanation (SPOILERS)}As a result of revelations in Babel that Theresa wiped the Doctor's memories to stop him from following Priestess's plans, fanart soon began portraying Theresa as smugly stealing the Doctor and Kal'tsit from Priestess's side.
• Wei Yenwu
  • There's nothing in the sewer.^{Explanation (Spoilers!)}Wei Yenwu's infamous Suspiciously Specific Denial in response to Ch'en's suggestion to investigate into said sewer (as it later revealed, he gets a squad of killers to kill the infected in the slums, in secret, and then dispose their bodies into the sewer) gets quite the attention there. Especially due to the tone being similar to the "There is no war in Ba Sing Se" meme from Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Gameplay

• "There are no bad operators, just bad doctors."^ExplanationOften pops up in tier list/viability discussions regarding operators, putting emphasis on the Tower Defense genre of this game that requires strategic thinking from the players more than simple RPG stat-checks. So in other words, it's not the in-game characters' fault if you keep on messing up in certain stages, the players need to step their game and strategy if they want to succeed. This phrase alone simply goes to show that the casual players and the hardcore players do engage in debates. It also had other implications - It can be used to defend operators who are ranked at the bottom tiers, it is commonly used in Self-Imposed Challenge videos of players clearing advanced stages using only low-rarity operators (As a proof that you don't need high-rarity units here for as long as you plan your moves). The reverse also happens, as this phrase is sometimes used as sarcastic comments to players who keep on failing a stage despite owning several high-rarity, Game-Breaker operators. Lastly, the phrase is also considered an insult by some, as it's often used to denigrate less experienced players and deflect legitimate criticism away from weaker operators...at least until the arrival of Passenger whose performance (at the time) was so underwhelming to the point that he couldn't kill even early game slugs by himself. Now a portion of the community believes that he was created specifically to challenge this meme.
  • "There are no bad doctors, just bad operators."^ExplanationThe inverse of this meme, pointing out that some operators are just objectively bad for most of the time, no matter how smart or good the player is when it comes to tower defense games..
  • "There are no bad operators, just better operators."^ExplanationA neutral stance compared to the above two phrases. Similar to the second phrase, it does point out that some operators seem to be weaker when compared to others, but every single operator has its own usage, even if it's niche. And instead of blaming the players themselves (i.e. the doctors) as the first phrase suggests, this phrase simply notes that Power Creep is in effect, and it's not the players' fault if powercreep exists.
  • "There is no Meta, just Waifus"^ExplanationA comical variant, used by players who are mostly just playing Arknights because of their favorite characters, waifus or husbandos. Meta be damned.
• "Auto Deploy has made a mistake."^ExplanationThe Auto Deploy AI is somewhat competent when emulating your team setups on easier levels, where margins of error are larger and it has more leg room to wiggle about, especially if your operators have been promoted and now cost more DP than they did last time. When attempting to Auto harder stages, however, it is highly prone to screwing up with placement or skill timing, especially if your prior manual attempt included rapid actions. The AI will sometimes forget to activate abilities at all, or placing/retreating operators even when it's dangerous to do, and bungling your otherwise manageable runs. Cases can range between letting a few enemies through, to outright failing because of the aforementioned reasons.
• LMD woes. ^Explanation LMD, the game's "main" currency, is notoriously hard to grind for and is only best gotten through the extra operations (which aren't even available for some days) or through fulfilling orders at base (which requires a steady and constant stream of Pure Gold). Expect much anguish over people talking about their larger-than-average LMD stock, only for it to go right down the drain upgrading one operator. Similar vein as the Fate/Grand Order's "QP hell".
• Clue 7^Explanation For whatever reason, Clue No. 7 is the most commonly-received one when searching in the Reception room. This translates into many players having and giving each other Clue 7 and only Clue 7, since that's all they've got, while others are a relative rarity by comparison. Officially acknowledged in Closure's Secret Files 12, where Closure and the Doctor look through the clues collected in the Reception Room, only to find that all of them are Clue 7.
• Our clue^ExplanationA snowclone of the "Communist Bugs Bunny" meme, where players jokingly suggest that if someone finds a valuable clue in search, it belongs collectively to everyone on their friends list. While it can apply to any clue, the original iteration of the meme specifically refers to Clue 4, which can only be reliably found if the player has an Elite 2 Istina or Absinthe, who gains additional points for hailing from a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Russia.
• "The Sniper class is really made up of snipers."^ExplanationThis is a snowclone of the "The Archer class is really made up of archers" meme from Fate/Grand Order, where it's often joked that the resident Archer class is composed mainly of Improbable Weapon Users that are labeled as such simply by virtue of them having ranged attacks, instead of using an actual bow and arrow. Similarly, the Sniper class in Arknights technically only has two proper snipers (Ambriel and Andreana). The rest are mostly archers or simply mid-to-close range firearm users. One even telekinetically launches slabs from above rather than using any ranged weapon.
  • "The Caster class is really made up of casters." ^ExplanationA similar meme regarding non-spellcasting Casters like Ceobe and Tomimi.
  • "The Medic class is really made up of medics!"^ExplanationAnother similar meme regarding the Medics who primarily deal damage like Kal'tsit, Hibiscus the Purifier, and Reed the Flame Shadow.
• Borgar!^ExplanationA corruption of "burger". During the second week of the "Grani and the Knights' Treasure" event, players were given free Sanity-restoring consumables every day in the form of fast food-style burger meals. When the event ended, so did the free burgers, and the low effective Sanity caps per day prompted a lot of players to start wishing the burgers would return.
• Operators eat rocks!^ExplanationMany operators, particularly the Rhine Labs gang, are typically memed as eating huge quantities of Orirock in lieu of food, due to the staggering requirement of that material and its derivatives when leveling them. Typically almost every operator will consume terrifying amounts of Orirock derivatives at some point, usually during skill ups, promotions, and Mastery training.
• "Top Operator is a myth"^ExplanationDue to the inordinate rarity of the Senior and Top Operator tags in recruitment, a lot of players have been having a hard time hunting for it, sometimes for months without luck. Particularly sad cases have the players in question be playing since day one and not seeing either of them even once, prompting them to deem them a myth in jest, but particularly Top Operator.
  • Indra and Vulcan are cryptids.^ExplanationIndra and Vulcan are two five-star operators only available through recruitment, and both are notoriously unlikely to show up. Vulcan can be guaranteed using a pair of common tags, but the chances of these tags ever appearing together are extremely slim, while Indra uses the same tags as the far more common Melantha and Matoimaru, meaning you'd need one of the aforementioned "Senior Operator" tags just to have a realistic chance of recruiting her. As these two cannot be obtained unless the Random Number God is really kind to you, very few players have them, which led many to joke that they weren't even in the game and that any evidence to the contrary is part of an elaborate hoax. This started to die off once Hypergryph gave players a guaranteed method to unlock them through the Achievement System.
• 5th Dorm.^ExplanationThe base skill of the four Team Rainbow Operators decreases the rate of Operator's morale decay by 0.05 for each Rainbow Operator in the Control Center. Putting all four of them in the Control Center results in them never losing morale at all. By adding any Operator in the 5th slot (except for Aak or Leizi, both of whom have base skills that increase the morale decay rate), all five Control Center Operators will recover morale. This leads to the joke of the Control Center becoming Team Rainbow's personal dorm.
  • Permanently locking Amiya/Swire/Lee inside the Control Center.^ExplanationBecause having all four Team Rainbow Operators assigned to the Control Center negates any morale loss, you can put a fifth Operator who offers a useful buff in with them and never have to worry about sending them to a dorm to rest. Amiya and Swire are both popular choices for this as they boost the productivity of Trading Posts, and Lee is also a popular choice as he significantly boosts the speed of clue collection. This has led to jokes and fanart showing them having a more... realistic reaction to being stuck working in the same room 24/7 with no breaks and only a group of complete strangers for company.
• Guardknights^ExplanationGuards are both the most common Operator type in the game and have quite a lot of very strong (or flat-out Game-Breaker) units, including Silverash, Surtr and Thorns. It's to the point where several end-game maps can be cleared just using Guards.
  • [X]knights^ExplanationAn offshoot of Guardknights, clearing difficult maps with just one operator class is usually referred to by whichever class that was - for example, clearing a map with only Casters would be called "Casterknights". Later, this would also extend to other non-standard clears, such as an entire team of Liberi operators being called "Birdknights" and so on.
• Malding Shop ^ExplanationA Flurry to the Flame featured a Monster Hunter-esque Melding Shop where players could unload their materials from farming the event stages. The main point of contention for the community is that unlike Heart of Surging Flame, which separated the final infinite prizes from the normal prize pool, the second "common" meld pool mixed both finite and infinite prizes together, thus requiring players to meld much more than normal to collect all the finite prizes from the event shop. Monhun players confirmed that the Melding Shop RNG is pretty much accurate to the experience, leading some to joke that there was such a thing as too much accuracy in replicating the monhun RNG experience.

Soundtrack

• Hypergryph is actually a music company. ^ExplanationDue to Hypergryph releasing many music videos of different music genres based on events and newly introduced characters on social media like Youtube and Twitter, many fans joke that Hypergryph is actually a music company disguised as a game company and are using the game Arknights to secretly promote their songs. This got taken even further with the reveal of the Arknights live concert in 2021, and the collab with Cytus II and Muse Dash - note that these are the only two outside (meaning that the content is in the other game) collabs as of yet. As of April 2022, even Google refers to Hypergryph as a record label◊ and as of November 2023, Ambience Synesthesia even won an HMMA award!
• SILVERRRR! AND GOOOOLD! WON'T SAVE MY ROTTING SOUUUUL!!^ExplanationA lyric from Operation Pyrite, the lobby theme for Contingency Contract Season #1 Operation Pyrite. The fact it comes near the beginning of the song and is a full-blown Metal Scream preceded by two much quieter lines caused it to stick out to players whenever they'd open the Contingency Contract menu and made it by far the best-remembered part of the song. Contingency Contract's infamous difficulty also led to jokes about this line being a warning to players that not even SilverAsh would be enough to carry them through the event.
• Hateful Avengers' theme song. ^ExplanationMany thought that the theme song of Contingency Contract Operation Blade, fits the description of Hateful Avengers, and how dangerous they can be. It seems to have become an Ascended Meme: a Hateful Avenger is the character depicted on the song's official vinyl record release, and the upcoming A Light Spark in Darkness event teases a katana-wielding character who used to be known in Ursus as the "Red Blade", akin to the debut of Kevin in Ethan's Operator Record.
  • YES I'M ON FIRE, IGNITED BY A BURNING DESIRE ^ExplanationWhenever Operation Blade is brought up, expect some of the Doctors to immediately sing the chorus out loud.
• THE GOLDEN AGE WILL RETURN AGAIN^ExplanationThe trailer showcasing Stultifera Navis as well as the music for one of the major battles, is a shanty-esque hymn that prominently repeats this line several times. The hype behind the event, the Awesome Music on display, and the sheer bombastic enthusiasm with which the line is sung quickly endeared it to the playerbase.
• Arknights Status / Texas Status / Lappland Status ^ExplanationSome Arknights songs basically became the "Status" equivalent of what "Bury the Light" is to Devil May Cry 5, or what "Rules of Nature" is to Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance - an Interrupting Meme which involves YouTube videos displaying some random content, only to cut to Arknights PV scenes and soundtrack. The most common variant uses the awesome theme song of Il Siracusano alongside scenes of Texas or Lappland. However, other character-specific songs and clips are used as well, leading to variants like "Mudrock Status" or "Specter Status", etc.
• Eyjafjalla Rickroll^ExplanationThe first few drum hits of the nighttime lobby theme of So Long, Adele sound hilariously similar to the one in Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, leading many players to wonder if they were about to get Rickrolled.
• "Max0r fans incoming"^ExplanationMax0r frequently uses music from Arknights and other gacha games in his Incorrect Summary videos. As a result, if you check the comments on any track he's used, you're likely to find Max0r fans referencing and quoting the scene that featured it, or thanking him for introducing them to a cool new song.

Fandom Lingo

• "Clairvoyance"^ExplanationA fan lingo borrowed from other gacha communities who are accustomed to their games' English server being behind the origin country's version in terms of content, but with the benefit of the English players having foresight on future events and banners. In the context of Arknights, this refers to the act of looking at the past schedule of the Chinese server, and making predictions or guessing the pattern of events before they get officially announced. Averted with standard Headhunting banners, as the Global server follows the Japanese server which doesn't follow the Chinese server's patterns and makes its own pattern instead, thus it's up to the JP server which 5- and 6-stars will appear in the Certificate shop. This also extended to the JP server announcing "Children of Ursus" instead of "Darknights' Memoir".
• Mash showing up in Headhunting/Recruitment.^ExplanationDue to Arknights gaining massive popularity when it was released, a decent number of players migrated to it from other mobile games, most notably from Fate/Grand Order, thus spawning meme edits of the Doctor being Ritsuka Fujimaru playing hooky in disguise, and Mash coming after them to drag them back to Chaldea.
• Hi Laurent.^ExplanationWithin the Arknights YouTube community is a notorious Arknights hater known as Laurent who constantly posts his dislike of the game as a reply to any comment on the official English Arknights YouTube channel. He not only uses outright lies and ridiculous facts but also tells players to abandon it for a "better" game like Genshin Impact (and later Alchemy Stars) since "the game is dying anyway". Naturally, many fans (plus Genshin and Alchemy fans) are annoyed with his antics, so rather than replying to him (since he is suspected to be a Troll or a bot), they either ignore him or just mock him by saying "Hi Laurent" and moving on. Meanwhile, other fans turned this around by mockingly praising his dedication to posting hate comments on every single comment on the official channel, joking that he's giving the game free publicity on the Youtube algorithm. It becomes Hilarious in Hindsight when a tweet from Arknights' official Twitter showcased a billboard advertising the game in the city of Montreal, Québec... which happens to be on a street named "Saint-Laurent Boulevard". Laurent's Youtube account has since been outright terminated, possibly putting an end to the meme.
• "AK character design is just blatant hypersexualization for the sake of pandering to horny teenagers"^ExplanationIn response to a Twitter thread criticising the designs of Genshin Impact's playable characters where one user compared them unfavourably to those of Arknights, another user fired back by accusing Arknights' character designs of being shallow and oversexualized. The post received such widespread mockery for going after a game known for its relative lack of fanservice that both the Arknights and Genshin communities teamed up to dunk on the schmuck, posting images of modestly-dressed operators like Saria in the replies with sarcastic complaints about how "sexualized" they were.
• No! Not kataokasan! Anything but that name! ^{Explanation (NSFW)}kataokasan is an H-doujin artist who has gained infamy among the community for the rather... grisly nature of their works, especially if they happen to involve Exusiai or Ch'en. As a result, any mention of them tends to draw out reactions of sheer dread and horror, fearing what they could possibly have cooked up for their darling Operators.

Hypergryph and staff

• Lowlight/UmiNeko, the head producer of the game himself, is a veritable Fountain of Memes. Usually whenever something wacky happens in the main story or events (Darknights Memoir being delayed, FrostNova and Patriot dying, etc...), the fandom will be very quick to chalk it up to it being a big brain move by UmiNeko, usually with an image edit of his grinning face somewhere in frame. While his memetic status was initially limited to Chinese circles, and even then usually only to those who had been following his work since his Girls' Frontline days, his popularity soon expanded to other fandoms after Arknights went global.
  • After he was spotted crossdressing as Andreanna of all people at a convention, UmiNeko experienced even more popularity, and with that, more memes, mostly about how he's been outed as One of Us and a pretty damn Wholesome Crossdresser.
  • Lowlight's Godhand.^ExplanationDuring the second year anniversary stream, every time they spun the prize wheel and it didn't land on "ALL," Lowlight moved the wheel so it pointed at ALL, or slapped a piece of paper with "ALL" on it over what the wheel landed on. Leading to many jokes about his supposedly magic hands. Then, in the second in a half anniversary stream, a gachapon machine was brought in, and Lowlight brought out the same "ALL" paper multiple times, eventually prodding the other streamers into pulling a ball with "ALL." The game itself has referenced this joke on a few occasions: the prize wheel was added as a furniture piece to commemorate the game's 3rd anniversary with every segment reading "ALL", and the "good" ending to U-Official's April Fools event has Lowlight's Author Avatar use his powers to make her experience "ALL" of her bad endings at once.
  • Lowlight plagarized Kal'tsit from himself.^ExplanationIn 2023, a group of Weibo users uncovered artwork of Kal'tsit and Mon3tr on Lowlight's old Pixiv account dating back to 2015, long before Arknights had even been announced. Believing they'd uncovered proof that Hypergryph had stolen a random Pixiv user's Original Character for use in their game, they planned to release the information publicly in the hopes of stirring up some drama... unaware that the "random Pixiv user" in question was the game's head producer. The whole debacle was met with mockery from the Arknights fandom, and an appropriately sarcastic response from Lowlight himself.

Arknights: Endfield

• Endmin Gremlin/Sassy Endmin ^ExplanationThe shorter and cuter female Endministrator was immediately treated as a gremlin due to how people in-universe were terrified that she had been awakened again. Became amusingly canon as of the Technical Test, where only the female Endmin is playable and her characterization supports fan intepretation of her as a smug gremlin, complete with trolling grins and shrugs, as well as no end of sassy and strange dialogue options.
• The factory must grow. ^ExplanationDuring the technical test for the game, many players noted how extensive and complex the basebuilding aspect of the game was compared to almost every other part of the game, with many playtesters sinking countless hours into turning their base factory into a hyper-optimized tangle of machinery and conveyor belts.
• Virginity Speedrun^{Explanation(NSFW)}About an hour after the first beta test promotional video came out. Rule 34 caught up with the female Endministrator with a short clip of video posted on Twitter/X. When such thing happens, it is given the euphemism "[X] lost virginity" or "[X] had been graduated from being a virgin". Some fans see it as an acknowledgement of Endministrator's attractiveness, especially since characters in Endfield do not wear blatantly revealing clothes during the video and in gameplay.

---

• FBI, open up! ^ExplanationWhile the meme isn't exclusive to the game, Vigna yelling the phrase word-for-word in the Heart of Surging Flame event quickly caught on, especially since Vigna was already a subject of a few FBI-related jokes. Fans also associated the meme with Ash after the Originium Dust event, as she was indeed an FBI agent.
  • LGD, open up! ^ExplanationA snowclone of the FBI meme, only instead of Vigna or Ash doing it, it's Ch'en, Swire, or Hoshiguma showing up to arrest you for similar offenses.
• Due to Pompeii's volcano theme and method of attack mirroring Eyjafjalla's third skill, players have taken to depicting Eyjafjalla wanting to adopt Pompeii, or Pompeii straight-up being her pet already. Others have tried comparing or even combining the two, with varying results.
  KyostinV: So now, you can understand how enemies feel when you use Eyjafjalla's third skill.
  • This gave rise to meme edits that place her face on Pompeii, also known as the "Eyja slug".
• Amiya and Eyjafjalla's "rivalry".^ExplanationDue to them sharing the same Caster archetype, Eyjafjalla is for all intents and purposes a direct upgrade over Amiya, and has time and again proven her usefulness in a lot of situations where her counterpart would struggle to get by, usually when mobbed by a lot of foes. While Amiya herself is plenty powerful, the self-destructive nature and small coverage of her kit shunts her into a smaller niche than Eyjafjalla can enjoy, which makes her significantly less useful than her supposed "rival". The meme intensified when it was revealed Amiya can change her class to Guard, with many fans joking that if Amiya couldn't take Eyjafjalla's place, she'll instead take Ch'en's. That being said, the whole rivalry thing is purely Fanon, as neither of them acknowledge each other in the game, much less fight each other over the Doctor's favor.
• Global servers will be doing this event instead of Darknights' Memoir.^ExplanationAfter it was indicated that Darknights' Memoir would be skipped from its original placement in the CN release schedule for the global version's release anniversary in mid January, jokes started popping up about how the global version would be doing every event but Darknights' Memoir and doing as much CN content as possible before getting to DM.
• Eyjafjalla skin when? ^ExplanationAs the game progresses in its lifetime, jokes have been made about when will Eyjafjalla get a new skin, with some fans and content creators feeling the need to make the joke when a new operator skin is released, especially for operators who aren't even released on the EN/Global servers yet, and some seem to quip that her "skinlessness" is implemented as a Necessary Drawback to balance out her sheer power. While there are indeed a few operators from the original launch who still do not have a skin (such as Franka and Indra), Eyjafjalla stands out in particular since despite being one of the most popular and hilariously game-breaking operator in the game, she is literally the only 6-star available since the launch of the game who still has not gotten a new skin while the other launch 6-stars did. For comparison, the most recent launch 6-stars who got their first skin are Saria and Angelina, back during the first anniversary of the CN release of Arknights. Some of the leading theories is that Eyjafjalla's artist, Anmi, had a falling out with Yostar after an Azur Lane artist traced her art, and therefore she won't contribute any more art to games associated with Yostar, while another theory is that Anmi is on maternal leave and is taking care of her newborn child, thus cannot contribute any new art at the moment. However, Eyja is announced to be receiving a skin at some point after Contingency Contract #5: Operation Spectrum, much to the rejoice of fans, though this doesn't change the fact that Eyja had the longest period of "skinlessness" out of the 6-star operators, a total of over two years. The joke would eventually come to a close when Eyja FINALLY got a skin with Coral Coast upon the rerun of Gavial: The Great Chief Returns.
  Aegle: Schwarz gets two skins but still no Eyja skin? Yep, pretty much.
  • Rosa's skin ^ExplanationAfter Eyja finally got her skin, fans felt the need to seek another 6-star to bully over their skinlessness. Naturally, they go after Rosa, since she is now currently the oldest 6-star operator without any skins, which has already came to a close when her skin will be releasing on the upcoming Near Light event.
  • Bullying "skinless" Operators ^ExplanationIt has become a trend for players and fans to mock Operators who have not received any skins for a very long time since their release, especially when later released Operators got a skin earlier than them. Franka in particular is especially subjected to bullying due to the fact that she had been available since the start of Arknights, and in Operation: Originium Dust, she was wearing a new outfit during the event (alongside her partner Liskarm), but for no discernable reason, it was not made into a skin whatsoever even though Liskarm's new outfit was.
• Old José is a fellow man of culture.^ExplanationIn Under Tides, the informant Old José, who is one of Skadi's acquaintances, was praised highly by the fan community for being able to convince Skadi to wear a stylish red dress to Sal Viento for her disguise (the same dress worn by Skadi the Corrupting Heart). The meme is based on a translation of a line said by Last Samurai.
• King of LASAGNA^ExplanationThe narrator in the Fall of the Witch King lore video from the 3rd Anniversary livestream pronounces 'Leithania' in such a way that a number of fans mistook it as him saying 'Lasagna', and jokes quickly circulated about it.
• Hypergryph hates white hairs.^{Explanation (Spoilers)}Fans noticed that characters with white hair have suffered the most out of everyone, such as Alina and FrostNova dying and Mephisto transforming into a bird. This has even extended to "predictions" that Elysium will die if Thorns gets an Alter. Ironically, "Babel" reveals that this can also apply to the Doctor, too (since the anime adaptation gave them snow white hair)!
• The confirmation that the game would be getting English voice acting inevitably led to more jokes being made.
  • Chris Pratt voicing Amiya^ExplanationAn offshoot of the "Chris Pratt voicing everyone" meme, fans joked that he will voice Amiya of all people.
  • THE ROCK as Suzuran^ExplanationSimilar to the Chris Pratt joke above, only having the one and only baritone Dwayne Johnson providing the voice for the cute and adorable Suzuran.
  • British Operators^ExplanationOn June 24th 2022, the first batch of English voice actors for the game had been revealed to players. However, to the unexpected surprise of many, the voice actors chosen were revealed to be fairly obscure United Kingdom voice actors, instead of (until Ideal City) hiring the more popular and recognizable United States-based voice actors (such as Cristina Vee, who previously performed songs for Arknights) done by other anime-styled gachas such as Genshin Impact, and the anime adaptations of the Fate Series, Azur Lane, and Girls' Frontline to name a few. Reception was fairly mixed, with the British accents (especially of Operators not from Victoria) and/or the complete lack of any familiar anime voice actors as a result of the casting choice ended up being some particular points of contention to some. This led to jokes that all the Operators of the game are British.
• Rockrock? Where is Mudmud?^ExplanationChapter 10 introduces the operator Rockrock as a playable Caster. Due to a combination of Mudrock existing and the silliness of Rockrock as a codename, many players started jokingly wondering when "Mudmud" would be released.
• KILL THE OCEAN!!!^ExplanationA paraphrasing of a line said by the Last Knight in his fervor against the Seaborn and the ocean. Due to how horrific the Seaborn threat truly is (as shown in Under Tides, Stultifera Navis, and Mizuki and Caerula Arbor), many fans have declared war on the ocean itself to destroy the Seaborn and those who would dare to sympathize with them. They are also joined by the crowd of people who have found the frustrations of dealing with the Seaborn for three consecutive events (Under Tides rerun, Stultifera Navis, and Operation Deepness) to be tiresome and demand a change of pace. The joke went further with the release of the Divine Heresy event in Neural Cloud's Global version, which similarly dealt with threats under the sea.
  • "Yes Inquisitor, this man right here!" ^ExplanationAny time anyone shows appreciation for the Seaborn in comment sections, expect others to decry them as a heretical Church of the Deep cultist and call for the Iberian Inquisition to take them away or purge them.
• If evil, why hot?^ExplanationFar from exclusive to Arknights, but the large number of attractive antagonists (who range from Well Intentioned Extremists to completely unhinged) leads to very frequent mentions of this specific quote, or even clamoring for characters with almost no screentime to become playable based solely on looks or even Perverse Sexual Lust. Popular subjects include Talulah, Eblana, Mandragora, and even Theresis, although minor antagonists like Amaia, Gertrude, and the Playwright also get this treatment.
• The Friends List Incident^ExplanationOn March 27th 2024, a bug occurred in the global server, causing all players' friends lists to be wiped clean. Although the issue was resolved within a few hours, it did not stop the deluge of jokes, such as sobbing over the Doctor having been abandoned by all their friends, players bemoaning that their friends list now reflects reality, or suggestions that Yostar wants the players to go out and make real friends. The realization that this was caused by the same update that implemented U-Official into the global version also led to jokes blaming the whole incident on her notoriously terrible luck managing to leak into the real world.
• The forever beta Base^ExplanationThe Base, where the the player can produce resources and train operators, has been labelled as "beta" since the game's launch, leading many to expect that the (frankly, somewhat janky) system will eventually be updated and modernized. This has yet to happen, leading many to proclaim that the Base will forever remain in beta state, or repeatedly joke/hope that the next event will finally bring a Base update. The meme has even travelled over to the spinoff game, Endfield - it has a strong base-building element, which was quickly hailed as the Base update everyone has been waiting for.

---