Minotaur Maze

Submission 7,582

About

Minotaur Maze refers to an illustration of the Greek myth Theseus and the minotaur drawn by Sir Edward Burne-Jones that was posted to Twitter in July of 2018 and parodied by users who thought the minotaur looked polite and perturbed by Theseus' presence.

Origin

On July 18th, 2018, Twitter user @mardirooster tweeted an 1861 Sir Edward Burne-Jones illustration^[1] of the Greek myth about Theseus and the minotaur which shows Theseus moments before he slays the minotaur. The tweet is captioned "please get out of my maze." It gained over 12,000 retweets and 34,000 likes.^[2]

Spread

After the tweet was posted, it was quote-tweeted by many Twitter users who thought the image was relatable. Twitter user @BrandonStroud joked about the tweet by writing a parody of the lyrics to ""Africa" by Toto":/memes/africa-by-toto (shown below, left), while the Twitter account for the podcast Myth Take suggested the minotaur just wanted some alone time (shown below, right).

Twitter users also parodied the image in some Object Labeling memes. @mardirooster, the person who sent the original tweet, posted an object labeling version in the thread beneath the original tweet (shown below, left). In their piece covering the spread of the minotaur meme, the Daily Dot^[3] posted a version of its own, saying the meme was a new format for the same jokes (shown below, right).