Meduka Meguca / Being Meguka is Suffering

About

Meduka Meguka refers to a crowd-sourced retelling of the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which began on the 4chan /a/ imageboard in 2011. The threads take the form of a series of image posts, featuring cropped details of episode screencaps, with corresponding dialogue. These threads tell the story in a humorous way, with intentionally misspelled character names and bad grammar.

Origin

On February 11th, 2011, the earliest known retelling took place on 4chan^[1] (shown below). The series consists of five separate threads which cover the entire plot of the show. The users acted out the series using bad quality animation clips borrowed from the show and posts consisting of intentionally poor spelling and grammar, including of character names and show terms.

• Meduka = Madoka
• Hameru = Homura
• Seyiku = Sayaka
• Coobie = Kyubey
• Meguca = Magical Girl

The entire series can be found on the Puella Magi Wiki^[2], both the archived threads and cleaned up versions.

Spread

On September 19th, 2011, YouTuber GeneralIvanVA^[3] began submitting voiced versions of Meduca Meguca, posting all five episodes. Among the releases, episode 5 is the most popular with almost twice as many views as the first episode due to a rap song that was included at the end. In particular, Kyubey's statement, "being meguka is suffering…" sprouted into a sub-meme of its own. Users of the internet liked this phrase and started to replace "meguka" with other subjects and characters. While the original video is no longer available, on May 2nd, 2013, YouTuber Exists to Keep Meduka Video on Youtube re-uploaded the video, which received more than 1 million views.

Following the spread of the threads and videos, people began posting memes featuring lines of dialogue from the retelling, particularly "being megucka is suffering" (example below). The phrase "being meguka is suffering" is still commonly used even in contexts where magical girls are not involved. Generally, it is used to express sympathy for the suffering of another person/thing or to express your own suffering. "Suffering" or "being 'x' is suffering" is now a commonly used phrase in internet culture.

Additionally, Meguca was also initially used as a parody of Me Gusta In these memes, the play on the similarities between the spelling of "Me Gusta" and "Meguca" inspired a series of image macros in which the two used interchangably.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References

^[1] /a/ – Meduka Meguca part 1

^[2] Puella Magi Wiki – Meduka Meguca

^[3] YouTube – GeneralIvanVA's Channel

^[4] Tumblr – Being Meguca is Suffering