Cicada Block

About

Cicada Block is the physical act of trapping someone in a corner by pressing one’s hands and feet against the adjacent walls to form a one-man barricade, mimicking a perched cicada insect. The block was first introduced through a scanned image of an unknown manga on the Japanese artist community Pixiv and later spread to Tumblr, where it spawned a series of crossover fanart featuring other well-known video game and anime characters.

Origin

A page from an unknown manga was uploaded to the Japanese art-sharing website Pixvi^[9] on October 14th, 2012, which illustrated a man being pinned into a corner by another character holding himself above the ground with his hands and feet against the wall (shown below).

Spread

On October 16th, 2012, a fanart illustration of the cicada block featuring Pokemon characters Lance and Lyra (shown below) was posted to Pixiv.^[10] The same day, Tumblr^[1] user Rabulen130 reblogged the Pokemon fanart with the tag “#cicada block.”

On the following day, Tumblr^[2] user Fideo published a post titled “If anybody’s wondering where the meme came from,” featuring a step-by-step instruction on how to form a cicada block. Within the first 24 hours, Fideo’s post received over 14,300 notes. The same day, DeviantArt^[3] user Sanpincha submitted a cartoon strip titled “PGNC: Cicada block’d,” featuring the characters Diego and Chel from the Pokemon Gijinka Nuzlocke Challenge (shown below, right).

Also on October 17th, Tumblr^[4] user StainedBrain submitted a Homestuck edition of the cicada block, which depicted the troll Karkat blocking the character Nepeta in a corner (shown below, left), and Tumblr^[6] user fideo submitted a photograph of two men demonstrating the block in live-action (shown below, right). Within the first 24 hours, the posts gained more than 2,400 notes and 4,500 notes, respectively. On October 18th, a “Cicada Block” theme page was created under the categories “poses” and “meme” on the art-sharing website Zero Chan.^[5]