Moon Moon

Confirmed 2,926,452

About

Moon Moon is a fictional wolf character that is portrayed as a mentally challenged outcast in the pack. On Tumblr, the character is often paired with silly interior monologues in a similar vein to the Doge meme.

Origin

The character was originally conceived as an alter ago name for Tumblr user Kitchiki, who was given the name "Moon Moon" by a name generator titled "What is Your Werewolf Name? (shown below).^[1] On April 5th, 2013, Kitchiki noted the silliness of the result in response to the original image post, which gained more than 158,000 notes in the first two weeks.

Spread

On April 15th, 2013, Tumblr user Frukass posted a reply^[10] to Kitchiki's post, containing a comic depicting a wolf pack on a hunt with Moon Moon suddenly rushing in to "get the thing".

Throughout April, several social media accounts and single topic blogs dedicated to Moon Moon were launched, beginning with the first Moon Moon Tumblr ask blog^[3], followed by The Marvelous Moon Moon^[4], the Twitter account @MoonMoontheWolf^[6], The Official Moon Moon Blog^[2] and F**k Yeah Moon Moon.^[12] On April 26th, Facebook page "Moon Moon the Wolf"^[13] was created. The legend of Moon Moon has also seen some spread beyond Tumblr, most notably on Imgur,^[5] Tickled^[7] and Reddit.^[9]

"Moonmoons"

On October 10th, 2018, Gizmodo^[15] published an article about astronomer Juna Kollmeier's research into how some large moons in the universe could have other, smaller moons orbiting them under the right conditions. The news was shared by New Scientist,^[16] who reported that while the moons had no scientific name yet, some had suggested "Moonmoon." They then tweeted, "Moons can have moons and they are called moonmoons," gaining over 10,000 retweets and 28,000 likes (shown below).

This led to a resurgence of jokes about Moon Moon the wolf on Twitter. User @saynt614 tweeted a screenshot of the original Moon Moon Tumblr post in the replies to New Scientist's tweet, gaining over 150 retweets and 1,800 likes (shown below, left). User @IntpWomen posted an old Moon Moon meme in the replies to New Scientist's tweet, gaining over 30 retweets and 350 likes (shown below, right). The Moon Moon jokes were covered by Daily Dot.^[17]