King Harold Dies / The X Is...

About

King Harold Dying is an exploitable image macro depicting a scene of King Harold, based on the frog prince, saying his final words before dying in a lily pad bed from the 2007 movie Shrek 3. The meme is typically used in the same context as the scene it's taken from, with the king dying mid-sentence before being able to fully get out his words, with the difference being that the meme purposely leaves the thought or phrase unfinished by using it as a phrasal template like The X Is…

Origin

On May 18th, 2007, Shrek the Third was released. The film features a scene in which Fiona's father, King Harold, starts the plot of the movie out with his death. During the scene, he is in the middle of telling Shrek about another heir to the throne when he faints mid-sentence, which the characters are led to believe is his death. He then springs back to life a moment later, dispensing with the rest of the plot-relevant info before finally dying. This scene was uploaded to YouTube by the channel still a kid^[1] on August 26th, 2018, where it received over 135,000 views in four years (shown below).

The first time the scene was used as a meme came from an Imgur comment thread on June 16th, 2019, in which a user on the site was attempting to get the sauce for an image and was met with disappointment. This thread was later uploaded to Imgur^[2] on June 18th, 2019, making King Harold's death into a meme template (shown below).

Spread

Over the following months, the format continued to spread online to other platforms. For example, on September 19th, 2019, Redditor^[3] Dennis584 used the meme template as part of a Who's Getting The Best Head? meme, having King Harold attempt to say the answer but dying before being able to give the answer. The post earned 4,600 upvotes in three years (shown below).

On June 27th, 2020, Twitter user CoffeeMaestro posted a version of the meme in which King Harold is about to reveal the reason why Dr. Disrespect was banned from Twitch, dying before stating the reason.^[4] The tweet earned over 800 likes in two years (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References