Line drawing of a military officer with monocle saying 'That wasn't very cash money of you, Otto'

That Wasn't Very Cash Money of You

2014catchphraseclassic

Published September 30, 2026

That Wasn't Very Cash Money of You is a catchphrase paired with a black-and-white drawing of Sayaka Miki from Puella Magi Madoka Magica wearing clip-art sunglasses. First posted to Tumblr in January 2014, it grew into an exploitable where all kinds of anime and cartoon characters get the same shades and deliver the line as a mock-serious call-out for uncool behavior.

catchphrase memes exploitable templates anime manga tumblr memes dismissal memes

Overview

The joke works on the mismatch between a dour black-and-white anime crop and the deliberately corny slang line, where "cash money" stands in for "cool"3. The base image is Sayaka Miki from Puella Magi Madoka Magica wearing pasted-on shutter shades, and the format is treated as an exploitable that any brooding character can be dropped into4.

Edits swap Sayaka out for other properties while keeping the sunglasses gimmick and the catchphrase intact, from Fire Emblem's Anna to a stomping Godzilla4. Because both the shades and the line are cheap to reproduce, the template is friendly to low-effort image edits, animated GIFs, and text-only quote posts.

Origin & Background

Platform
Tumblr (origin) / Reddit (2018 revival)
Creator
things-in-sunglasses
Date
2014

On January 26, 2014, Tumblr user things-in-sunglasses posted the original Sayaka Miki edit captioned with the phrase, and the post picked up more than 106,000 notes over the following four years1. The Tumblr, as the handle suggests, was dedicated to pasting sunglasses onto characters, so the Sayaka image fit the account's ongoing bit.

The underlying artwork may have been adapted from an earlier ungla­ssed version of Sayaka. The earliest documented copy of that sunglasses-free image was uploaded to the Allspark forums on March 13, 2014, after the meme edit was already circulating2.

How It Spread

Once the Sayaka edit took off on Tumblr, the format moved by way of character swaps. A DeviantArt entry appeared on August 21, 2015, and Twitter user @ObsidianWasp posted a version starring Anna from Fire Emblem4. Urban Dictionary added a definition on December 18, 2015, framing the line as a comeback for when someone steals a meme or scrubs a watermark3.

The catchphrase stayed active in anime and cartoon circles through the mid-2010s, always leaning on the same shutter-shades gag4. Because it started as a still image, it also worked as a pure text reply, which helped it move outside the original picture into Twitter and Discord chat.

In September 2018, the format restarted on r/dankmemes with an animated Godzilla version. A post by user Dolphin_follower44 on September 17, 2018, cleared 100 upvotes in under an hour, and a same-day post by user jackota picked up 65 upvotes in an hour, pushing the phrase back into rotation on Reddit4.

Timeline

2014-01-26

Tumblr user things-in-sunglasses posts the original Sayaka Miki sunglasses image with the catchphrase.

2014-03-13

The earliest known copy of the unedited Sayaka Miki drawing is uploaded to the Allspark forums.

2015-08-21

A DeviantArt user posts a redrawn version of the format with a different character.

2015-12-18

The phrase is added to Urban Dictionary as slang for calling out uncool behavior.

2018-09-17

An animated Godzilla version by user Dolphin_follower44 hits r/dankmemes and revives the format.

Frequently Asked Questions