Bravo Nolan

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About

“Bravo Nolan” is a sarcastical statement used to mock plot holes or incongruity on films by the British movie director Christopher Nolan,^[1] especially Inception,The Dark Knight saga and Interstellar. The catchphrase has derived into the phrasal template“Bravo X”, also used as message of dismay towards someone.

Origin

The earliest use of the phrase can be found on a 4chan’s /tv/ board thread submited on July 23th, 2010, featuring a message criticising the final of Inception.^[3]

Percursor

The use of the word “bravo” as a ironic statement predates the critic one. One of the earliest instances can be found on a 4chan’s /a/ board thread submited at February 4th, 2008, as response to a post where some anonymous user explains that he made a girl break up with her boyfriend and then he rejected her, asking if is a bad person.^[2]

Spread

The phrase remaint dormant until February 11th, 2012, when a thread on /tv/ was submited, featuring a capture from Rotten Tomatoes and the catchphrase.^[5] The same thread featured other variations of the catchphrase on the same context. Another use of the catchphrase can be found on a post submitted on /tv/ on April 21st, 2012, on a thread featuring a critic to the movie The Dark Knight Rises.^[4] The phrase started being used as a spam, shitposting and vertical posting practise.^[6]

Sasuga

A notable derivate from the catchphrase comes with replacing “Bravo” by the japanese word “Sasuga” (さすが). This expression is mostly used on anime or japanese culture discussions, with a similar context. One of the earliest instances of his use as sarcastical reply can be found on a thread submitted on 4chan’s /a/ board on October 24th, 2009, where a user replies to the original poster because the thread has no replies.^[9] The first use as critic can be found on a /a/ thread submitted on November 18th, 2009, with the message “Sasuga Shaft” as reply to a message that features scenes of works by the japanese animation company Shaft and compares them to Haruhi Suzumiya’s scenes.^[10] The expression is primarily used to criticise plot twists or plot holes on manga and anime.^[7]