Waluigi

The earliest organized Waluigi fandom appeared on DeviantArt, where the Walu-club group formed as one of the first dedicated communities, gathering nearly 500 members who shared fan art ranging from action scenes to portraits of the character drinking coffee2. Waluigi shipping groups like RosalinaXWaluigiCLUB and Waluigi-Daisy-fans also cropped up on DeviantArt4.

The first major meme moment came on April 1, 2009, when webcomic artist Matthew Taranto had Waluigi "take over" his Super Smash Bros. webcomic Brawl in the Family, renaming it "Waluigi in the Family" as an April Fool's joke10. The takeover featured 17 absurdist comics in Waluigi's voice and introduced the now-iconic catchphrase "Too bad. Waluigi time"4. Waluigi became a recurring character in the webcomic after that, appearing in 47 total comics and hijacking every subsequent April Fool's event4.

Tumblr saw its own wave of Waluigi content starting around 2012. Ask blogs like "Ask Waluigi" and "WAAAAAAAH" impersonated the character, posting artwork, answering fan questions in-character, and sharing memes4. The character's over-the-top voice and appearance made him particularly well-suited to the platform's absurdist humor.

In 2012, a fourth-grade student from Alberta, Canada named Sam Daly won a national writing contest with "Ode to Waluigi," a 27-line poem praising the villain's cleverness. Judge Sheryl McFarlane liked the poem for "making a hero out of an oft-ignored secondary character, something all of us feel like sometimes"2. The win was covered as a novelty story and became another data point in the growing "Waluigi as lovable underdog" narrative4.

March 2013 brought Waluigi's crotch chop GIF to Reddit. User designty posted an animation from the Mario Strikers series showing Waluigi making an X gesture over his crotch after scoring a goal. The post hit r/gaming and pulled over 14,000 upvotes and 500 comments2. The game's director Mike Inglehart later explained the team at Next Level Games wanted to make Waluigi "a bit edgier than Wario," and that when they presented the taunt to Nintendo, "nobody batted an eye"1.

In August 2014, ROM hacker russmarrs2 released a mod replacing Link with Waluigi in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time14. The mod, which swapped both child and adult Link models with a Waluigi model, was covered by IGN14, Polygon13, Kotaku12, and Dorkly. Young Link as a tiny Waluigi looked "wonderfully ridiculous," as Polygon put it13.

July 2017 marked Waluigi's biggest pre-Smash viral moment when James Nielssen posted an 18-second mashup of Waluigi and DJ Khaled's "Wild Thoughts" on Twitter2. The clip plastered Waluigi's face onto Khaled and Rihanna in the music video and racked up over 95,000 likes and 54,000 retweets. When the Daily Dot asked Nielssen about the video's success, his explanation was simply: "Waluigi thicc af"2.