Davay Snova (Let’s Do It Again)

What is shown in the frame

The photo is a close-up of a man’s face with long dark hair and a mustache, some strands falling over his face and one eye half-closed. His gaze is lowered, with an expression of both defiance and mild madness. The frame was clearly cut from a moving video: the image is slightly blurred and the angle is informal, typical of screenshots from vlogs and let’s-play videos rather than a staged shoot.

Origin: a Game Grumps video

The meme’s source is a video by the American blogger and YouTuber Arin Hanson, known under the pseudonym Egoraptor. He is one of the hosts of Game Grumps, a channel devoted to playing games together with commentary. In one of the videos, with a theatrically mad expression, he says he will do something again despite a previous failure. This frame became the basis of the meme, which spread as a reaction image.

How the meme reached the Runet

In the English-speaking segment, the image and its accompanying phrase became established as a meme about stubbornly repeating an action against common sense. In the Russian adaptation, the emphasis shifted to the short imperative caption “Davay snova” (“Let’s do it again”). It is used more broadly than the original video’s context and does not necessarily require knowing who is pictured.

Typical situations of use

The meme is applied as a reaction to any story about repeated attempts that are doomed to fail but are made anyway, from everyday mishaps to gaming and work situations. The caption reads both as encouragement and as an ironic remark on stubbornness: “lost five times in a row, well, let’s do it again,” or “texted your ex at 3 a.m. again? Let’s go again, what the heck.”

This flexibility, which is not tied to any specific topic, largely explains the meme’s longevity. The face in the frame has become a universal symbol of the resolve to “step on the same rake” again (a Russian idiom for repeating the same mistake).

Why the face is memorable

The expressive, almost caricatured facial expression is what makes the image a convenient template: the emotion reads instantly and needs no explanation. Because of this, the meme easily fits into all kinds of posts and comments, working primarily as a visual accent for a short caption rather than as a reference to the person pictured or to the content of the original video.

The meme’s fate beyond the gaming community

Initially, the frame and phrase were understood mainly by an audience familiar with let’s-play videos and the channel where the original clip was filmed. Over time, however, the meme detached from its gaming context and became part of the general set of Runet reactions, alongside other faces and phrases whose origins most people who use them no longer know. This is the ordinary fate of a successful reaction image: the recognizability of the emotion outlives the memory of its source, and the caption “Davay snova” now works on its own, without reference to a specific video or YouTube channel.

In Russian-language public pages, the picture is often placed at the end of longer joke-stories, where the frame itself serves as the punchline, a visual confirmation that the story’s hero is about to repeat the same mistake (“step on the same rake”) all over again. This use turns the meme from a simple reaction into a kind of refrain closing a short comic story in the comments.