Peace Was Never An Option

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About

"Peace Was Never An Option" is a memorable quote spoken by the fictional character Erik Lehnsherr, better known as the villain Magneto, as played by Michael Fassbender in the movie X-Men: First Class.

Origin

On February 10 2011, 20th Century Fox released the first trailer for X-Men: First Class, which was viewed over 15 million times on YouTube.^[1]

Towards the end of the trailer, the following piece of dialogue is spoken:

[Charles Xavier]: Listen to me very carefully, my friend: killing Shaw will not bring you peace.
[Erik Lehnsherr]: Peace was never an option.

Spread

The line, as well as Fassbender's overall performance, were considered by critics to be one of the strong points of First Class; in an article on the popular blog Comics Alliance, David Brothers considered the line to be a crucial key to understanding Magneto's character in the film.^[4] The line is a quote often used by fans when making references to Magneto.

The first use as a caption for an image macro happened two years after the release. An image of a cockatiel atop a tank toy captioned with the line was posted to the meme aggregator MemeCenter in 2013, where it gained over 3,000 likes.^[3]

Untitled Goose Versions

On September 24th, 2019, Twitter user @erkshnrt posted an image of the Goose from the Untitled Goose Game standing on a handle of an axe, captioned with the quote (shown below, left).^[6] The post received over 8,100 retweets and 19,000 likes in two weeks and referenced a popular "Peace Was Never an Option" reaction image of a white chicken standing on an axe handle (shown below, right).

On September 28th, 2019, Twitter user @CampbellxEmma tweeted another image of the Goose holding a butter knife in its beak, based on a close-up of a promotional image for the game,^[7] captioned with the quote.^[8] The tweet received over 20,600 retweets and 71,600 likes in one week (shown below, left). In the following days, multiple users on Twitter used both images as reactions.^[9]^[10] On October 2nd, 2019, Redditor Happinss-Noise posted a meme based on the image to /r/dankmemes subreddit,^[11] where it gained over 43,000 upvotes in five days (shown below, right), prompting popularity of the format on Reddit in the following days.