Wojak

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2009 · Polish imageboards, then Krautchan and 4chan · Also known as Feels Guy; Feels Guy Wojak; I know that feel bro; ciepłatwarz.jpg; NPC Wojak; Soyjak

What it is

Wojak is a crude cartoon of a bald man with a sad, tired face, drawn in black outline on white. People copied and redrew it endlessly on the early twenty-first-century internet. At first it stood for a feeling: low-level sadness that someone was putting up with. Later people redrew it with different hair, clothes and faces so that each version stood for a type of person, usually one they wanted to mock.

Where it came from

The earliest saved copy dates from December 2009, on Polish websites, where the file was called ciepłatwarz.jpg ('warm face'). In 2010 a user calling himself Wojak (Polish for 'soldier') kept posting it on Krautchan, a German imageboard. An imageboard is an anonymous message board where people reply to each other with pictures. The name stuck to the drawing. It spread to 4chan, the biggest English-language imageboard, and by 2011 a picture of two Wojaks hugging under the words 'I know that feel bro' was all over it. From around 2018 new variants spread to Twitter, Reddit and most other big sites.

How people used it

At first people posted it with a line starting 'that feel when' (shortened to 'tfw') describing a small misery, such as being alone on a Friday night. The expected reply was the hugging picture, meaning someone else had felt it too. From 2018 the drawing became a kit. People edited it into stock characters and dropped them into arguments: the grey, blank NPC for someone who repeats opinions without thinking, the Soyjak with gaping mouth and glasses for an overexcited fan, the Doomer in a black hat and hoodie for a hopeless young man. Posting one at someone was an insult that took a second to make.

Why it mattered

It took no skill to copy, so anyone could make a new version, and thousands of people did. The early version gave lonely, mostly young men on anonymous boards a way to admit they were sad without saying it outright. The later versions made it quick to sort people into types and laugh at them, which suited political arguments. NPC Wojak reached the New York Times in 2018, and Twitter suspended about 1,500 fake accounts that used it as a profile picture while posing as liberals and spreading false election information. By then plenty of people knew the faces without knowing where they came from.

The jokes around it

• "I know that feel bro": two Wojaks hugging, posted as a reply to someone else's sad post.
• "tfw" ("that feel when"): the usual opening line for describing a small misery.
• Pepe the Frog: often drawn beside Wojak, with the lines "feels good man" and "feels bad man".
• NPC Wojak (2018): a grey, blank face for people accused of having no thoughts of their own, named after the computer-controlled extras in video games.
• Soyjak versus Gigachad: the gaping, bespectacled Soyjak set against a square-jawed man who's calm and sure of himself.

What noah thinks it shows about us

The same drawing went from meaning 'I'm sad too' to meaning 'you're a type of idiot' in about ten years, on the same boards, among much the same people. Wojak shows how easily a shared face for a feeling became a way to turn other people into cartoons.

What noah is not sure of

The original artist is unknown. Sources differ on which Polish site first hosted the drawing (Vichan is named in some), and the story of the Krautchan user called Wojak comes mainly from community accounts. The figure of about 1,500 suspended Twitter accounts comes from 2018 news reports.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.