A FAMILIAR MEME. A NEW CONTEXT.

THD: Twin Head Dragon or “Tidehunter Damage”

What this meme means

THD was the old DotA nickname for Jakiro, Twin Head Dragon. On Russian Dota 2 broadcasts it was reborn as the joke “Tidehunter Damage.”

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Twin Head Dragon: where the three letters came from

In the original DotA for Warcraft III, the hero Jakiro went by Twin Head Dragon. As a reader recalled in the comments on cyber.sports.ru, THD was Jakiro’s nickname “in the first Dota”; in Russian the abbreviation is written “ТХД.” There is no exact date for when it took hold: it is slang from the first DotA era.

In Dota 2 the hero kept the name Jakiro, but the nickname did not disappear: a 2020 guide on cyber.sports.ru, “Guide to offlane Jakiro,” still uses THD as the hero’s short name.

THD on air and a confused chat

The abbreviation got its second life on Russian-language broadcasts. As Alexander Chernyshev put it in a cyber.sports.ru blog post titled “The dumbest jokes of CIS Dota. Why is it funny?” on December 20, 2020, one of the casters or analysts mistakenly called Tidehunter “THD” on air, using Jakiro’s old name from the first Dota. The blog section was even titled “THD – Twin Head Dragon, not Tide Hunter Damage,” and the joke, in the author’s words, “dragged on.” Chat had no idea who he meant and started asking en masse what it stood for. The year 2020 on the card is the date of that post, the earliest article about the meme found.

Exactly who started the meme is unclear, and sources disagree. The 2020 blog post, citing the dota2.ru forum, tentatively names the analyst Mag, while readers commenting on later posts tie the spread of the joke to the analyst Inmate. Caster V1lat also joked about the abbreviation. All the accounts found come from blogs on a single platform, so the details are best treated as versions.

“Dendi’s precise hook” and the TideHunterDamage copypasta

Since nobody offered a clear explanation, viewers made one up. Options included “Dendi’s precise hook,” a nod to Dendi, “Try Hard Dota,” and finally the most enduring one, “TideHunterDamage.” The copypasta spammed most often in chats read: “THD, from the English TideHunterDamage. A special Tidehunter build where he plays carry and itemizes for damage.” The pasta also asked people who weren’t in the know not to write about THD and not to drag in unrelated heroes.

The joke runs on absurdity: “physical damage Tide” sounds like a nonexistent broken strategy. A later cyber.sports.ru blog post with that very title already calls the meme “the legendary Tidehunter Damage,” and commenters still argue about what the letters originally meant: some remember Twin Head Dragon, others name analysts.

Jakiro’s portrait on the card

The meme card uses a small portrait of Jakiro: a two-headed dragon with one ice head and one fire head. It is not a broadcast frame and not Tidehunter, but an illustration of the abbreviation’s original meaning, since this is the hero who was called THD in the first DotA.

The link between the picture and the meme rests on the history of the abbreviation: Tidehunter entered the joke only in the Dota 2 era, while the original THD is Jakiro.

THD caption examples

THD captions can play on a strange build, “secret” knowledge, or a baffling abbreviation on air. These examples are made up for illustration:

“Built Daedalus and Butterfly on Tide. That’s not trolling, that’s THD,” “The analyst said ‘THD’ and I spent forty minutes googling,” “Picked Jakiro. Old-timers get it, that’s THD too,” “Tide with six damage items: don’t ask, it’s THD.”