ayo gurl imma need a master ball up in here / cuz you playin hard to catch
A Ash Pedreiro post.
A mate at the pub has spent the whole evening working Pokémon into a chat-up line. He's proud of it. He tries it on the first person who looks his way, and she finishes her drink and leaves mid-sentence. You type out a flirty text, spot the pun in the second line and delete the lot. Twenty minutes later you send "hey" instead. It gets a "lol, hi". That's the best result you've had all year. Someone in the group chat says, "go on, say it to her." Your cousin, who knows every Pokémon by number and nothing else about people, takes this as a challenge. Everyone watches. Nobody will mention it at Christmas, and everyone will remember it. At 2 a.m. the shared notes app holds a list of terrible puns written by three people who should know better. One of them reads "I'm just practising". None of them has the nerve to use any of it on a real person. **Why it caught on:** the picture is a drawing of Ash Ketchum, the cap-wearing hero of Pokémon, redrawn with a leering grin and an exaggerated face. "Pedreiro" is Portuguese for bricklayer, which points at the stereotype behind the joke: the builder who wolf-whistles and shouts clumsy chat-up lines at passers-by. People kept the leer and swapped the builder's patter for Pokémon puns, and the format spread because every fandom has someone who can turn anything into a bad pickup line.