NetEase’s wildly popular hero shooter Marvel Rivals has been having a vampire problem this season. The arrival of the Fantastic Four within the game as part of the “Empire of Eternal Night” storyline has also seen Dracula himself become the big bad of the new series of maps rolling out this season, as heroes battle to liberate New York from his despotic control. But the focus on Dracula, and Rivals‘ latest map in particular, has helped revive a classic Moon Knight meme.
Last week’s debut of the Season 1.5 update in Rivals—which, aside from bringing in the Thing and Human Torch as playable characters, included the second in a series of maps set in a vampire-infested New York, Central Park—has really pushed the game’s feud with Dracula to the fore of its environmental storytelling. The new map, which sees players fight over escorting the Asgardian squirrel god Ratatoskr, whose magical horn can help the heroes bring Dracula down for good, has a ton of cool references, and even a fleeting glimpse of the imprisoned Blade, potentially setting up his debut in the roster later down the line.
But yes, it does also have Moon Knight calling Dracula a nerd and hoping he gets paid.
Moon Knight has several new voice lines for the Central Park map that refer to the “Where’s my money meme”—although in-game he does call Dracula a “bloodsuckin’ nerd” instead of a “big fucking nerd” like the famous Photoshop. Those references have led people to think that the victory screen for the new map climaxes in Moon Knight finally getting his money back as another reference. But, sadly, to burst all your bubbles, what Moon Knight is actually holding is several pages of the Darkhold, secured after they were scattered across Manhattan during Dracula’s invasion. So yes, he is securing that paper, but the paper is excerpts from the famous Marvel Comics arcane tome, and not a couple hundreds or something.
Where Did the ‘Dracula, Where’s My Money’ Meme Come From?
The famous panel of Moon Knight threatening Dracula isn’t real, of course—it began proliferating online in the last decade or so, joining “Random Bullshit, Go!” as one of the premiere Moon Knight memes (honestly, as a Rivals strategist main? That is the meme I think of most going up against an enemy Moon Knight). It got a resurgence, even without Dracula being involved, around the time of Moon Knight joining the MCU in his own show, but the original panel itself comes from a 1987 issue of Solo Avengers, a Marvel anthology comic anchored around Hawkeye that also featured regualar stories from a plethora of Avengers-affiliated characters.
Marc isn’t actually hunting Dracula in the original story—”Tower of Shadows” by Tom DeFalco, Mark Bright, Josef Rubinstein, Ken Feduniewicz, and Jack Morelli, seen in the pages of Solo Avengers #3—but looking for a villain at the behest of one of his allies, Jack Russell, aka the Werewolf-by-Night. Having just joined the West Coast Avengers, Marc agrees to help Russell follow a lead, the story actually turns out to be a switcheroo: Moon Knight has been sent into a booby-trapped castle and set against the superhero Shroud as a test to join Night Shift, Shroud’s roster of night-themed heroes. He turns the offer down to stay with the WCA and goes on his way, and it would take decades for Moon Knight to even brush up against vampires and Dracula in the comics—not until the 2024 event Blood Hunt, which, similar to the current season of Rivals, saw the world thrust into eternal night as part of a vampiric invasion.
Rivals offers its own spin on Marvel lore, of course, so in doing its own riff on a similar idea, it saw the perfect opportunity to throw a few nods to the famous meme in the process.
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