The Parkour Civilization meme phenomenon comes from a series of Minecraft videos telling a story of a society based around parkour. This began in 2023 on YouTube and TikTok as user “Evbo” laid out the tale of an oppressed individual trying to navigate constant jumping challenges as a “parkour noob” in a bizarre world.
By September 2024, these videos would reach Twitter and explode in popularity, resulting in memes often derived from series quotes and themes.
What is Parkour Civilization?
Parkour Civilization is the story of a single “parkour noob” born into a Minecraft world that is completely centered around the sport. Social hierarchies are based on how good you are at parkour, with “noobs” forced to live in an underworld of single blocks of land suspended in the sky, subsisting on just enough food to live as they train in hopes of making it with the “pros.”
The only way to make it to the secure above world is to earn a ticket to attempt an “impossible” parkour course in the Temple of Parkour, which, according to the protagonist, no one has completed before.
Evbo plays the protagonist and provides the story’s narration while also doing the voices of the other characters. The dramatic tone of the narrative combined with the silly setting and graphics makes quotes like “here in Parkour Civilization, no one chooses to jump for the beef” highly amusing.
Where did the Parkour Civilization Meme come from?
Evbo uploaded the first episode of the Parkour Civilization series to YouTube on October 5, 2023. One day later, they posted a one-minute version of the episode to their TikTok account.
The series gained a decent amount of interest on these platforms over the months as Evbo posted more episodes and clips, but it didn’t hit meme status until late September 2024. Once it reached Twitter, the memes proliferated, and interest in the subject skyrocketed.
On September 26, a Twitter user with 37,000 followers by the name of @clown_depot reposted the first Parkour Civilization TikTok video along with the beef quote and gained over 10 million views in a few days. It also collected over 2,000 quote tweets full of memes and praise for Evbo’s storytelling.
Spread and Parkour Civilization meme variations
As more people watched the series, they soon began to use old and new meme formats to reference, praise, and dramatize Parkour Civilization like it was a multi-million dollar HBO series. Many users compared it to popular anime and manga.
On September 29, Twitter user @AveryCubed posted an altered version of the panel from the manga Jujutsu Kaisen that became a meme in 2023, changing the line “Nah, I’d win” to “Nah, I’d jump for the beef.”
Meanwhile, others have created alignment charts and put together fake quotes referencing the series in the Yeonmi Park on Joe Rogan meme format. The series has also been compared to other works of dystopian fiction such as Mad Max: Fury Road.
Parkour Civilization meme examples
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