Brock Obama

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Brock Obama is a photoshop mashup that fuses Barack Obama with Brock, the rock-type Pokémon trainer, usually swapping their faces or bodies for absurd effect. The joke first surfaced on YTMND in February 2008 and grew huge through a Facebook page launched January 30th, 2010, which became one of the earliest meme pages on that platform.

Overview

Brock Obama is a hybrid character that fuses the 44th U.S. President Barack Obama with Brock, the Pewter City Gym leader from the Pokémon anime1. Most versions are photoshops that swap faces or bodies between the two, and rock-type Pokémon like Onix or Geodude sometimes appear in the background as a visual pun on Brock's specialty3. The joke leans on the near-rhyme of the two names plus the absurdity of a cartoon trainer running the executive branch.

Fans built out a fake political-religious mythology around the character called 'Brockism,' with the president supposedly ruling from Pewter City as party leader of a fictitious group called the Brockists. Urban Dictionary picked up the 'Brockism' entry on July 1st, 20112. The Brock Obama Facebook page4 kept the bit alive through years of scripture-style, in-character status updates.

How It Spread

'Brock Obama' launched as a Facebook page4 on January 30th, 2010, and became one of the earliest meme pages on the site3. Its climb kicked off the meme-page trend and spawned copycat spin-offs, including Bardock Obama, a Dragon Ball fusion. The page had built up over 204,000 likes and roughly 6,000 associated images by late August 20214.

The evil-twin counterpart Amabo Kcorb, Brock spelled backwards, launched as its own Facebook page4 on May 31st, 2011, sporting a mustache and goatee for the villain look. Amabo and Brock's pages regularly reversed each other's posts and staged wall-to-wall arguments only followers of both would fully catch. The Amabo page4 later dropped the 'Kcorb' half of its name and had roughly 51,000 followers by August 2021.

On September 18th, 2011, trolls hijacked the original Brock Obama page4, swapping the profile picture for a Hitler-Lincoln composite and flooding it with My Little Pony images. The page bled nearly 10,000 subscribers in three days before the original admin took it back on September 21st. A mirror page pulled over 12,500 members inside 72 hours during the fight for control. Later hijacks drove the compromised original into a stretch of offensive posting that fans openly criticized1, and Facebook eventually deleted the hijacked copy in July 2013.

How to Use This Meme

A typical Brock Obama edit takes a photo of President Obama and swaps in Brock's spiky-haired anime head, or drops Obama's face onto Brock's cartoon body1. Creators often place a rock-type Pokémon like Geodude or Onix in the background as a visual pun on the 'rock' wordplay. Captions may reference 'Brockism' scriptures or the fictional Pewter City presidency to stay in character2.

Frequently Asked Questions