The Yancha death pose refers to an Internet Meme based on Yamcha, a character from the classic Anime/Manga Series Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z.

In the early part of Dragon Ball Z, the Z Fighters are fighting off the villainous Saiyans who intend to exterminate all life on the planet and use the eponymous Dragon Balls to obtain immortality and eternal youth. One of the Saiyans, named Nappa, decides to grow a team of plant-based alien minions known as Saibamen to fight the Z Fighters for them, one for each Z Fighter. Yamcha decides to go first since, even if he fails, they can resurrect him using the Dragon Balls (the same could not be said for any of the other Z Fighters). Despite being stronger than the Saibamen and easily overpowering one of them, Yamcha drops his guard, allowing the Saibamen to latch on to his body and use its self-destruct technique "Saiba-Bomb", blowing both of them up. Following the explosion Yamcha's corpse is found lying on its side in a fetal position in a crater.

The exploitable image quickly spawned a large volume of parody fanart and illustrations on the Japanese illustrators' community Pixiv, which were soon picked up by a number of Yahoo Blogs. The drawing meme eventually made its way into the English web in 2010, as seen on imageboard hubsites and anime-related forums like Danbooru. The meme was also documented by TVTropes Wiki in the "Ascended Meme" article. It is often used to indicate failure, weakness, or humiliating defeat.

The fact that Saibamen are among the weakest mooks in DBZ meant that Yamcha quickly gained Memetic Loser status among fans, with his death pose being used to mock anyone else with a similar reputation.

More Information

Yamcha Death Pose (Know Your Meme)

See also

• family guy death pose