Pokémon’s Regirock Became An Absurdist Punchline

When multiple corners of the internet collide, you sometimes stumble upon some of the most absurd, unexplainable nonsense. That’s half my TikTok For You Page, and having firmly set myself on the Pokémon TikTok track, the algorithm feeds me all sorts of videos of Pikachu and all his 1000+ friends.That means I have seen a lot of clips that insert the Generation III rock-type titan Regirock into any meme and format you can imagine, and I’ve been racking my brain for months trying to explain it to people.

Many of these videos originate from the account regirocktok. This account has dozens of videos that put Regirock into different moments of pop culture. If there is a sentence that has been uttered by a celebrity or public figure that can have Regirock’s name forced into it somehow, this account has found it and put TikTok’s text-to-speech over the audio to say the Pokémon’s name. They also put its low, robotic voice in the video at some point for good measure.

The regirocktok account may be the biggest advocate for putting Regirock and its other Regi-brethren in different clips, but it’s not the sole source of members of the Legendary Titans used as meme fodder in the Pokémon community. The Regis (Regirock, Regice, Registeel, Regigas, Regieleki, and Regidrago) are all defined by being mostly faceless entities that embody different elements. Their “faces” are just dot-like eyes, so they don’t convey emotions through expressions. However, despite their incredible Pokér face, each of them has an absurd-sounding voice, and the juxtaposition of their imposing features and the silly sounds they utter makes them perfect punchlines.

Those contrasting features make Regirock and its fellow titans easy to project on. It’s why, when Pokémon fans are always looking for a Regi joke. It’s why a video of a person covered in floating tubes resulted in in a made-up, water-type Regi called Regitube becoming a viral sensation. Regirocktok is the natural endgame for the fandom’s adoration for these characters on a platform like TikTok, where trends evolve, but maintain a specific format. This can be through a specific dance or audio, with creators riffing on those bases to make new jokes, all of which require a basic understanding of the original format to be in on it.

Trying to explain how we got to regirocktok almost takes away the magic of the joke that we’re all in on. It makes zero sense to anyone on the outside,but is easily understood by anyone who has been online and a Pokémon fan, and who has seen how obscure fandom perceptions of something can morph into memes. The Ruby and Sapphire PokéDex entries describe Regirock as something powerful that had to be sealed away, but to a subset of modern Pokémon fans, it will always be Cunty Regirock with a handbag.