Frieza's «I'll Ignore That»

Origin¶

The screenshot comes from Dragon Ball Super episode 114, “Bloodcurdling! The Explosive Birth of a New Super Warrior!”, which aired in Japan on November 5, 2017 and in its English dub on June 8, 2019. During the Tournament of Power arc, the villain Frieza is confronted by a fighter named Catopesra, who boasts about being able to move three hundred times faster. Frieza simply turns away with the line “I’ll ignore that” — no threat, no counterattack, just a composed dismissal delivered with the polite, sing-song menace that has defined the character since the 1990s.

Spread¶

The first documented meme use came five days after the Japanese broadcast. On November 10, 2017, Redditor TheLowestOfTiers posted an object-labelled version to /r/Kappa in which Frieza ignores Dragon Ball GT, the widely disliked non-canon sequel series; it drew 270 upvotes and 67 comments. From there:

• February 2018 — Twitter user kingslayer25 used it as a plain reaction image, one of the earliest instances off Reddit.
• February 13, 2018 — a DeviantArt variant was uploaded by user OmniSuperSaiyan.
• September 9, 2019 — the ESL Counter-Strike account posted a version about roster changes, collecting 585 likes.
• March 10, 2020 — a post on /r/dankmemes cleared 40,000 upvotes, the format’s largest single hit.

Format¶

It runs in two modes. The dominant one is object labelling: Frieza occupies the left of the frame, his back turned, while the thing being dismissed is labelled on the right. The second is the plain reaction image, dropped into a reply with no labels at all, where the caption does the work. Both depend on the same read — that the subject has been seen, weighed and deliberately set aside.

Meaning¶

The appeal is the composure. Frieza is not pretending he did not hear; he is announcing that he heard and is choosing not to respond, which is a far heavier move than an outburst. People use it to brush off a mild insult, a bad take, an unwanted question or a fact they would rather not engage with, always with the implication that the restraint is a mercy rather than a retreat. The smile is what makes it read as a flex.

The line itself is not fixed. Different subtitle and dub renderings give it as “I’ll ignore that,” “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that” and similar phrasings, so the image circulates under several near-identical captions rather than one canonical wording. That is unusual for a reaction built on a quoted line, and it means the picture keeps working even when the text is paraphrased.

Legacy¶

Dragon Ball has produced more durable reaction material than almost any other anime — Over 9000 is still quoted by people who have never watched an episode — and this is one of the franchise’s most-used modern additions. It has outlived its own episode’s news cycle entirely, appearing in esports, sports and brand accounts that have no connection to the series, and it sits in the same category as Ight Imma Head Out: a template for exiting a conversation on your own terms.