Chotto Matte

Chotto Matte is the Japanese-language version of the Vault Boy hold up meme, which is a reaction image that features a screenshot taken from the well known RPG game franchise Fallout.

Vault Boy is the iconic mascot of the series who appears during tutorials and cutscenes throughout the games. In the black and white still image, we can see his figure standing in a bent position while having his arms stretched in front of him and his palms facing downwards.

The caption “hold up” was added posteriorly to the image, as the character gives out the impression of being surprised after seeing something odd.

As a meme, chotto matte is used as a reaction image under controversial topics. A similar example for this type of reaction images would be the I have several questions meme.

The original English version was initially gaining traction on the site 4chan’s /co/ board starting from 2016.

It is believed that the meme was translated to Japanese in order to put it in context with anime-related contents. The first entries of chotto matte are leading back to a 9gag post from 2017 that featured an image macro of an anime scene and Vault Boy’s ionic posture.

While the original version of chotto matte was widely spread and commonly used on various popular platforms like Reddit, Tumblr or Twitter, the Japanese variant only made appearances online on a handful of occasions.

The format was added to Memegenerator in 2019 but only managed to gain 3 upvotes since then.

• Quora – Japanese (language): What does “chotto matte” mean and how is it used?
• Reddit – r/animememes