Metroid is a Nintendo sci-fi adventure series built around bounty hunter Samus Aran, and its four-decade run turned it into a meme incubator as much as a game franchise1. The fandom cluster around it spawned its own vocabulary of jokes: Horny Samus advice-animal macros pairing the armored protagonist with cheesy pickup lines, the MBD (Mysterious Black Dude) gag pulled from an E3 2009 Metroid: Other M trailer, and the plaintive Miiverse question Y Can't Metroid Crawl? posted by user PaulyU while stuck on the Wii U Virtual Console release of Super Metroid3.

Outside those specific jokes, the wider fandom keeps the series in circulation through wikis, trope catalogs and long-running fan sites like Metroid Recon, Metroid HQ, Metroid Database and ShineSparkers13. Urban Dictionary entries riffing on the word itself, from the in-canon Chozo translation of Great Warrior to slang uses aimed at draining girlfriends, show how the name leaked past gamers into general web slang5.

Fandom memes typically pull from a small pool of recognizable elements: Samus in the Power Suit or Zero Suit, the SR-388 setting, the floating Metroid creatures, or specific scenes like the MBD encounter3. Horny Samus posts follow the standard advice-animal format with an image of Samus and a bottom-text pickup line3. Y Can't Metroid Crawl? is often quoted verbatim as a caption when a game character bafflingly lacks a basic movement option3.