The Biggest “Holy F**k” Moment of 2023 [IGN]

What I found was a wider variety of options, a cornucopia of moments that elicited, what I assume to be, audible shouts of “holy fuck” from IGN’s editorial staff. Of course everybody has their own personal bars to clear where choosing to say “holy fuck” out loud and full throated regardless of whether one is alone in the room. That’s just the nature of subjectivity. As the voting came in, however, I was struck by the feeling that I honestly have no idea where, when or how we, culturally, decide to say “holy fuck.” Have the words lost meaning to all of us, or just me? Rest assured, it’s a topic I’ll be taking up with both HR and my therapist.

In the meantime, the laborious task of distilling a year’s worth of divine-profanity-inducing entertainment has fallen to me, and with it, comes an opportunity to rediscover the veracity of the phrase “holy fuck” and, more importantly, what constitutes a moment vibrant enough to cause a screaming fit in front of one’s friends and family. To that end, let’s start with a moment referred to on our ballot as “Gen V’s Dicksplosion.” So… here we go I guess.

#6: Gen V’s Dicksplosion

Landing in sixth place with 8.1% of the vote, this moment comes from the fourth episode of The Boys spin-off Gen V, titled “The Whole Truth.” The moment comes on the heels of blood-controlling protagonist Marie asking Gen V’s resident psychic rapist Rufus for help, only to be mind-controlled back to Rufus’ dorm where she comes-to in time to see Rufus’ open kimono and bad intentions.

Then she blows up Rufus’ penis.

Now…

Okay, so…

I mean there’s not much that’s not “holy fuck” worthy about anything I just typed or you just read, so my question was an immediate, “Why just 8.1%?” Perhaps it’s three seasons of The Boys that have trained us to expect this sort of thing. Maybe it was the mostly nonplussed “let me just wipe all this blood off my face” reaction to the whole thing. It’s also an extension of Marie’s powers that we hadn’t known about up to then, controlling somebody else’s blood. So in that sense, with additional blood rushing to Rufus’ meat banana, coupled with the other gorey weiner blast we’ve already seen in The Boys Season 3, another exploding branch is kind of obvious in retrospect.

Still, 8.1% feels low to me, which is admittedly more a product of my confusion at the prompt than anything else. If a splattering willy ranks so low, maybe there’s a level of absurdity needed for a good “holy fuck.”

Enter Alan Wake 2.

#4: Alan Wake 2’s We Sing Moment

Once you get about halfway through Alan Wake 2, you find yourself, very suddenly and without preamble, in the middle of a rock opera. It’s, frankly, pretty rad. And caused enough of our staff to shout “holy fuck” directly at their controllers to land in a tie for fourth place with 12.9% of the votes. So, no that #4 was not a typo and yes we’ll get to the other number 4 in a moment.

Alan Wake 2, which is set in the dreamy and surreal Dark Place, has no shortage of the bizarre, but something about wandering into this music video stands out among the rest. Unlike Gen V’s detonating pork sword, there’s nothing about this moment that’s particularly shocking, certainly not gruesome. There’s some light lift story elements presented as Alan gathers a new weapon or two and his backstory is recapped. It’s business that could have otherwise been dry, stock and MUCH shorter. Instead, very real band Poets of the Fall performs a power ballad for close to 20 minutes worth of gameplay as Alan wanders through a nightmarish arena of jumbotrons.

It’s a chapter that takes an otherwise forgettable storytelling necessity and makes it wild as hell. There’s a theme there that I like, where bellowing “holy fuck” so the neighbors can hear is concerned. There’s an effort at play, by the developers, to make sure even the business-y to-do lists of the gaming world are worth remembering. We know this stuff is coming and part of the deal, but to do it in a way this bonkers is surely worth some profanity.

12.9% though? And even tied with something else for fourth? There’s more to “holy fuck” than just very gross and very weird. How about very frustrating?

#4a: Across the Spider-Verse’s Ending

Into the Spider-Verse was a kaleidoscope of new. An animated superhero origin story, on paper at least, shouldn’t be as compelling, but the joke was on us. It was an incredible story about a new (to the big screen) character and to call the animation style “fresh” is offensive and an understatement so, to say the least, audiences couldn’t wait for Across the Spider-Verse. That Beyond the Spider-Verse was planned, announced and already being worked on was just icing on two well-intentioned cakes.

Then it ended before we wanted it to. Miles was stuck in the wrong dimension, facing off with another Miles as the credits rolled. What’s fascinating about this moment, beyond the fact that 12.9% of my colleagues leaned out their windows to bellow “holy fuck” at their entire neighborhoods, is that it took a long time to happen on screen. It builds for whole, long minutes, well after we’ve gotten the sense that something is not right, and even past the point where we most likely know what’s happened. It’s a slow-played twist that wraps up an intense part 1 and left a lot of audiences a little miffed we aren’t getting part 2 sooner.

This holy fuck moment exists on two planes for me. The first, in its intricate crafting. On its own merits, the narrative deserves a holy fuck. But the second plane is one of frustration. The ending of Across the Spider-Verse is a “no way” kind of holy fuck and a saltier, “give me a break” kind of holy fuck.

It’s an expletive-inducing twofer and that sets it comfortably tied for fourth. It’s a little shocking, if not in a gory way, a touch out of left field with a pinch of aggravation. Maybe that’s what docked it the few percentage points that kept it from standing alone in fourth?

If only there were some kind of positivity behind a holy fuck that we could compare it to…

#3: Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom – Discovering the Depths

Nothing got IGN staffers to build a perpetual motion flying machine, take to the skies and scream “holy fuck” quite like Tears of the Kingdom did this year. The game was eagerly anticipated, long in the making and able to deliver on the promise. What really gave IGN a potty mouth, though, was discovering the Depths.

The world presented in Tears of the Kingdom was already massive and the entire map, sky included, was worth exploring for hours on end. Then you find a sinkhole and discover that Tears of the Kingdom is twice as big as you thought it was. The cavern system hiding underneath the whole game was kept so close to the vest prior to the game’s release it was truly a thrilling surprise.

On top of that, five years in and Nintendo is still finding ways to stretch this cute little Switch to its limits. That the platform can handle a game you could easily spend a hundred hours in before finding out there’s a whole other hundred hours of world to explore is a testament to the creative team and more than a little deserving of 14.5% of our team’s divine F-bombs.

But this is where our “holy fuck” fest starts to get wild. Notice the small incremental increases in percentage points between number six and number three. The most meta holy fuck of them all is that our number two moment doubled them up.

#2: Logan Roy’s Death

With a whopping 32.3% of the votes, the Season 4 episode of Succession, “Connor’s Wedding,” actually caused an entire Slack channel called “#HOLY-FUCK” to show up on IGN’s servers as if created by an algorithm or God because Logan Roy had died.

The death of an old man, whom we first met three-plus seasons ago pissing in his own closet thanks to a stroke, is not on the surface a moment worth screaming about. The show itself is called Succession, so the end of Logan Roy had to be inevitable, yet the show managed to make it shocking.

First and most obvious is that it happens in Episode 3 of the final season. Traditionally, big things like this happen at the end of seasons, but ultimately that’s a small part of it. The show killed its main character off-screen and gave his children only a few awkward and maybe pointless moments with him on a speakerphone. The moment also lacked the catharsis we usually see when a series antagonist goes. Logan, in addition to being fiery and compelling, was the key to the whole point of the show. That he went without naming a successor was just another ramification, and that his would-be successors spend the rest of the episode wallowing in the aftermath takes the painful vibe of the show to 11.

Every expectation that we’ve come to know about the structure of narrative TV shows, particularly prestige shows from HBO, gets subverted and maybe that’s the most important takeaway here. It takes genuine surprise to bring out a properly profane reaction. Moments we come across in games and series and movies that truly stick with us need to be unexpected: more than an exploding wanger, a strange rock opera, a frustrating cliffhanger or suddenly getting twice as much game. It takes Logan Roy dying unceremoniously off-screen in the bathroom of a private jet 10 minutes into Episode 3 of a 10-episode final season to get IGN’s Slack workspace to spontaneously combust with screams of “holy fuck” before we even had a chance to.

Slack, as it turns out, knows us pretty well.

#1: The Last Minute Run-In – The GTA 6 Trailer

And just when we thought we were done with all the voting and ranking and SEO optimization for our year end awards, an 80s Tom Petty hit blares and the GTA 6 trailer comes bursting into the ring to join the ‘holy fuck’ donnybrook as the crowd goes wild. To say that the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer drop disrupted IGN’s coverage plans is a polite understatement bordering on missing the point of just how nuanced the string of profanity it caused really was. We even had to do a run off vote for this award, which it won handily with 63% of the votes.

First in the holy fuck queue, there was the leak. With less than a day to go before it’s official drop, the trailer showed up on X / Twitter, snagging thousands of views before the trailer was removed and the posters account suspended. Rockstar, having been shoved down the water slide with little choice but to just ride it out, decided to drop the official trailer early as well, rendering untold hours of careful marketing strategy utterly goddamned pointless. GTA 6 has been and continues to be one of the most anticipated games of all time. Hype around just seeing the trailer was big enough, but the fervor around the leak and their decision to drop it early took things to the upper reaches of holy fuckdom.

And if that weren’t enough, secondly, the trailer looks incredible. The aforementioned hype was difficult enough to live up to and it seems the fine folks at Rockstar have done that and more. Environments creating a map that stretches from the beaches to the streets to the everglades and the keys. The rendering of hair and water and fireworks. The texture of light at sunset, of birds flying through the glades, of thrillbillies covered in mud and alligators wandering into convenient stores. The game looks good enough to call your mom to say that you love her but holy fuck the GTA 6 trailer leaked and also looks incredible.

The leak, followed up by a legitimately jaw-dropping 90 seconds of trailer created the exact kind of moment this award was made for. So way to go, Rockstar, you snuck in at the last second to steal the Biggest Holy Fuck Moment of 2023 from an old dead guy.