What's that shadowy place? / That is mordor, simba. You Must attempt TO walk into it.
A Lion King Shadowy Place post.
Your mate asks what's in the group chat you muted in 2019. You tell him it's a shadowy place and he must never go there. He goes anyway, scrolls up four years, and is never quite the same. Someone at work says "let's circle back on that" and you ask what's behind the door marked "Legacy Systems". Nobody knows. The one person who did left in 2017, and the documentation is a single screenshot. You open the loft hatch for one box of Christmas decorations. There is a bin bag of your school exercise books, a CD wallet, and a shoebox of photos nobody agreed to keep. You close the hatch gently and say nothing. A younger cousin asks what the old fashioned thing on the wall is. It's a landline. You explain that it rings and you have to answer it without knowing who it is. She looks at you like you've described a haunted house. **Why it caught on:** the picture is a scene from Disney's animated film The Lion King, in which Mufasa stands with young Simba at the top of Pride Rock and tells him about the land that is the kingdom's, with one dark place at the edge that he must never go to. People turned it into a two-panel format where Simba asks what the shadowy place is and his father names something awkward, embarrassing or best avoided, from fandoms and old social networks to teenage Facebook posts. It spread because everyone has somewhere they were told, or told themselves, never to go back to.