Stormtroopers facing a hooded figure with yellow subtitle reading 'We weren't expecting special forces'

We Weren't Expecting Special Forces

2017image macroclassic

Published November 4, 2026

A line of stormtrooper dialogue from the April 2017 reveal trailer for Star Wars Battlefront II became an image macro after fans screenshotted the moment one trooper tells a sergeant, "That's the point." By mid-2017, iFunny posters were slapping the frame onto captions about reposted memes and other online overreactions.

star wars image macro memes ifunny memes gaming catchphrase memes

Overview

Posters crop the shocked stormtrooper frame and stack caption text on top to label anything that overpowers a group of unprepared people1. The second trooper's reply, "That's the point, Sergeant," sometimes appears in a two-panel version, with the first panel playing a reaction and the second panel confirming it was intentional2.

Tone swings between fond and sneering. Fans use it to call a friend "special" in the laudatory sense, while edgier posters, especially on iFunny in 2017, attached the screenshot to jokes targeting people with disabilities2. The format works because the trooper's voice line reads as both a tactical complaint and a dry description of someone being extra.

Origin & Background

Platform
YouTube (trailer source) / iFunny (viral spread)
Date
2017

EA developed Star Wars Battlefront II and uploaded the reveal trailer to its EA Star Wars YouTube channel on April 15th, 20173. In the woodland combat scene, a stormtrooper tells a superior, "We weren't expecting special forces," and a trooper in black armor replies, "That's the point, Sergeant," right before the Death Star detonates overhead3. By 2021, the trailer had passed 16 million views1.

EA produced the trailer, so the publisher is the subject of the meme, not the author of the format. The earliest meme edits came from anonymous iFunny users later that spring2.

How It Spread

On June 12th, 2017, an iFunny poster uploaded the stormtrooper screenshot with the caption "when a big account repubs my meme," picking up more than 88,400 smiles over the next four years4. That post is one of the earliest archived uses of the image as a standalone macro and set the tone for the self-deprecating variants that followed1.

The screenshot kept circulating through 2020. On June 5th of that year, Instagram user @mememanmyles paired the frame with a photo of a protester whose sign read "it's so bad even the introverts showed up," collecting over 41,000 likes within a year1. On August 20th, 2020, Redditor u/jojn posted the screenshot alongside a news article about 4chan banning images of the film Cuties to the r/memes subreddit, where it drew more than 77,500 upvotes5. Each reuse applied the same beat: a group showing up with unexpected intensity, met by the trooper's resigned confirmation.

Timeline

2017-04-15

EA Star Wars uploads the Battlefront II reveal trailer to YouTube, including the "We weren't expecting special forces" exchange[3].

2017-06-12

An iFunny user posts the screenshot captioned "when a big account repubs my meme," one of the earliest archived macros using the frame[4].

2020-06-05

Instagram user @mememanmyles pairs the image with a protester holding an "introverts showed up" sign, drawing more than 41,000 likes[1].

2020-08-20

Redditor u/jojn posts a version about 4chan banning Cuties images to r/memes, collecting over 77,500 upvotes[5].

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