Summary
- Duolingo has announced its owl mascot, Duo, is dead.
- Various video game mascots and studios have been claiming they’re the ones who killed the owl.
- Master Chief, Ezio, and the residents of Palworld are among the many vocal suspects.
My sincerest apologies if this is how you’re hearing the news, but Duo, the Duolingo Owl, is dead. Duolingo broke the news on Twitter, revealing that it doesn’t know who’s responsible but an investigation is underway. I would say case closed since quite a few video game characters and developers have claimed responsibility, however, so many suspects have stepped forward that the case should probably remain open.
The statement confirming Duo’s death came out of nowhere and it’s still unclear why exactly the language app has decided to kill off its mascot. Perhaps we have all become so immune to the owl’s threats when we don’t keep on top of our streaks that the Duolingo bosses felt compelled to shock us into learning a little bit of French every day.
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If the goal was to remind everyone that Duolingo exists then mission accomplished. People have been doing one of three things since the statement was issued – paying their respects, questioning why we’d care, or claiming they killed the owl. The video game world has mostly gone for option three with some of gaming’s most notable mascots and characters claiming they’re the ones who finally silenced Duo.
Everyone In The Video Game World Wants To Be Responsible For Duo’s Death
Who In Games Would Be Most Likely To Murder An Owl?
Assassin’s Creed’s UK account was one of the first to claim it killed Duo, sharing an image of Ezio taking out the owl with “You’re welcome” as the caption, just in case it wasn’t clear enough from the image. Halo‘s response to the tragic news – Master Chief standing over a dead Duo, although it’s difficult to tell if he’s mourning, responsible, or both – earned a reaction from Duolingo. The language app replied “Gone, but not forgotten” to Halo, to which the Halo account followed up with a second photo with Duo’s pic added to a montage of lost Halo characters.
Ezio and Master Chief are far from the only gaming suspects in this high-profile mascot murder. Whoever runs the Monster Hunter Twitter account has publicized its plans to turn the owl into a hooting horn. Palworld’s devs posted a pic of Duo hanging upside down, Destiny 2 photoshopped the owl on the end of spear, and somewhere in the infinite world of The Sims there’s a shrine to the recently deceased cartoon owl.
Suffice to say, if Duolingo planned on narrowing down the list of suspects by making Duo’s death public domain, mission very much not accomplished. It seems many were annoyed by the owl’s threatening check-ins whenever we dared to miss a day and break our Duolingo streaks, so much so that even fictional characters are more than happy to be forever known as owl murderers.
