Zanzibart... Forgive Me

About

Zanzibart… Forgive Me is a catchphrase meant to parody the way FromSoftware games handle their lore. The catchphrase originally comes from a joke by Borderlands 3 writer Sam Winkler, who quipped that FromSoft games can have a boss named "Myrmidon of Loss" cry a seemingly random phrase like "Zanzibart… forgive me" upon dying, leading fans to praise the game's lore. This led to posts imagining the FromSoft boss and the invention of fakelore around Zanzibart.

Origin

On February 5th, 2022, Borderlands 3 writer Sam Winkler^[1] tweeted, "Dark Souls revolutionized games, in the sense that instead of a story now you can just have some guy with a big sword named Myrmidon of Loss who gasps 'Zanzibart… forgive me' when he dies and then twenty YouTubers will make an hour long video about how deep your lore is." The tweet gained over 8,200 retweets and 67,000 likes in roughly two months (shown below).

FromSoftware games will often not explicitly explain the lore behind various bosses and enemies the player faces. Instead, players can attempt to piece together how the bosses fit into the larger story by reading item descriptions and exhausting NPC dialogue. This has led to the rise of YouTubers who have grown prevalent for explaining the lore of the games, such as VaatiVidya.

Though it's unclear if Winkler was parodying a specific FromSoftware character, his tweet is reminiscent of several boss encounters in FromSoftware games. For example, in Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the player will come across the Armored Warrior boss, who upon dying, cries "Roberto!"^[2] It is the only time a character named "Roberto" is mentioned in the game. VaatiVidya covered the lore of the Armored Warrior and Roberto in a video (shown below).

Spread

Initially, Winkler's tweet was taken as a dig at FromSoftware games. At some point after Winkler's tweet, Tumblr user official-mugi reposted it, quipping, "The jokes write themselves, 'cause he certainly didn't write any." The account has since been deleted, but the post was reposted to Reddit's /r/Curated Tumblr^[3] on February 7th, 2022 (shown below, left). However, in the replies to his original post, Winkler^[1] clarified he was merely poking fun at FromSoft games but was a fan of their storytelling (shown below, right).

In the weeks after Winkler's tweet, "Zanzibart" became a running joke among FromSoftware fans, particularly on 4chan, where some fans discussed Zanzibart as if he was a real character. On March 22nd, 2022,^[4] an anon posted a picture joking that Zanzibart was a giant boss in the games (shown below, left). On March 19th,^[5] an Elden Ring player posted a screenshot of a corpse, captioning the picture, "Zanzibart… Forgive me…"

Various Examples

Search Interest

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External References