Rei Plush / Rei Chiquita

Submission 473

Part of a series on Rei Ayanami. [View Related Entries]

About

Rei Plush, also known as Rei Chiquita, is a plushie version of the character Rei Ayanami from the anime franchise Neon Genesis Evangelion, which later became an exploitable used in a series of memes online. Memes involving the plush toy either use one IRL by putting it into situations for meme context or use a stock image of an online posting to create an image macro. The plush version of the character was popularized to the point in which fan art of the toy started to be made in place of the normal version.

Origin

The Rei Ayanami plush has been available from various retailers, such as Amazon, Walmart and Hot Topic, for years, but memes involving them started appearing in early 2020. On February 9th, 2020, Instagram user Arsenagi^[1] uploaded an image macro of the Rei plush, captioning it, "Forget your pain and laugh at funny anime plush," which gained over 1,100 likes in four years, sparking the trend shortly after (shown below).

One of the first memes to utilize a physical version of the Rei Plush was first uploaded to the subreddit /r/evangelionmemes on March 4th, 2020, by Redditor EarthAngel2,^[2] who uploaded a picture of one standing in a door way claiming that "dad said it's your time to ride on the eva" as both a spoiler to part of the show and a reference to the Mom Said It's My Turn On The Xbox meme (shown below). The post received over 1,500 upvotes in four years.

Spread

Following the initial burst in 2020, memes involving the Rei Plush would continue to proliferate on various social media platforms. On Reddit, the subreddit /r/ReiPlush^[3] was made on December 25th, 2020, where fans of the character and the plush posted their own versions of memes or images involving the plush for the following years.

On August 3rd, 2021, a viral post on the subreddit involved the Redditor DarquesseCain^[4] uploading an image of a Rei cosplayer fishing out of a boat and catching a Rei plush. This image would later be the inspiration for an art piece made by Twitter / X artist @aiu4041^[5] later that year (shown below, left and right).

As an object, the Rei Plush would see itself continually ported over into new meme formats as it continued spreading online. On January 9th, 2022, Telegram user EternalClassic^[6] posted a series of meme variations on the Willem Dafoe Smoking Cigarette With Two Oranges One Of Them Moldy with one of them being a version in which he is Gendo holding two Reis, one of them plush (shown below).