Y Can't Metroid Crawl

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About

Y Can't Metroid Crawl is a phrasal meme within the gaming and Metroid communities as a way to joke about inexperienced gamers after a user posted that comment to the Miiverse while playing Super Metroid.

Origin

On May 16th, 2013, Miiverse poster PaulyU posted "Y Can't Metroid Crawl?" to the Miiverse with a screenshot of Samus standing in front of a spot where she is supposed to roll (shown below).

Spread

The post quickly went viral online as users mocked both PaulyU's obliviousness to Samus' roll function and the fact he called Samus "Metroid". Threads were posted to NeoGAF^[1] and Reddit^[2] the following day including PaulyU's post in a collage with other players struggling with Metroid.

On May 28th, Kotaku^[3] reported that PaulyU had finally beaten Super Metroid and documented the experience with various other comments. For example, at the end of the game when a Metroid appears, he commented "Jellyfish is helping yes."

The phrase became a popular in-joke in the fandom for the inexperience PaulyU displayed. It was documented on the Miiverse Wiki,^[4] where it is noted that the comment gained over 3000 "Yeahs" as of September 2015, though it has since been deleted. On April 28th, 2014, Nintendo acknowledged the popularity of the phrase by tweeting a joke about it (shown below, left). On October 3rd, 2014, Twitter user @Electivirus posted a screenshot in Super Smash Brothers WiiU that seemed to reference the joke (shown below, right).