Try Finger But Hole

About

Try Finger But Hole refers to a prominent Dark Souls player message that became a catchphrase in memes after the release of Elden Ring in late February 2022. In such messages, players leave an in-game note for others to see in their game world comprised of preselected words, with "try finger but hole" becoming one of the most prevalent over the years.

Origin

Dark Souls 2 Precursor

With every new iteration of the Souls series, the situations where a funny player message could be posted increased. It also became more incentivized since having your messages appraised positively would sometimes result in you gaining another charge of your Estus Flask (healing item), meaning funny messages could outright benefit your gameplay and make you stay alive longer. With Dark Souls 2's release, there were more female characters that would receive similar messages about them as Gwynevere did (shown below, left), while a new format type started to emerge, posting messages next to scenery that involves "but hole." This can be seen in the meme where a message next to a bent-over skeleton says to "Try Tongue But Hole" (shown below, right).

Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring

The meme was then changed when Dark Souls 3 came out and the famous message "Try Finger But Hole" became a staple for anytime an NPC was bent over an object (shown below).

With the release of Elden Ring on February 25th, 2022, more player messages began to pop up in a similar fashion to previous titles, with a return of "Try Finger But Hole" being one of the most prominent ones. In the tutorial area, when having to cross a bridge, players placed the evergreen message on the bridge just past the official developer ones, knowing that new rookies to the series will saunter up and get a glimpse of another player gesturing to the sky with one finger while loudly proclaiming what they should do (shown below).

Dog

In Elden Ring a very popular player message meta began where various animals, such as the Merchant's donkey, or the turtles around the world, will have a player message either asking if it is a dog, or declaring that it is a dog. This meme is believed to have been started as a reference to Borat in which he looks at a turtle and asks what kind of dog this is. The reference was uploaded to YouTube by the channel Stulander^[2], where it gained 751,000 views in 12 years (shown below).

The messages asking about turtles being dogs became so prevalent that the r/EldenRing Subreddit started to see multiple memes referencing turtles as dogs being made, with the Redditor^[3] S_A_W7 uploading a meme on March 5th, 2022, about what he thought dogs were before and after playing the game (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References