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2009·Early YouTube

Polandball

An entire genre of geopolitical satire drawn in MS Paint, in which every country is a ball wearing its own flag.

You might remember it as countryballs, Poland cannot into space

A meme

The story

What this was

A meme classified under space.

It first appeared in 2009, during early YouTube.

It began on the German imageboard Krautchan as a way of mocking a Polish poster's English, which is an unpromising start, and became something considerably better: a genre in which the joke depends on knowing real history, and which is written collaboratively by people from all the countries being satirised. It is one of very few internet forms where the humour requires the reader to have done some reading.

Polandball outgrew its origin board entirely and lives now on Reddit and Facebook with communities in dozens of languages, and with an internal rulebook about how the balls may be drawn that is enforced more strictly than most professional style guides. The upside-down flag has become the genre's signature rather than an insult.

You were there

More from 2009

The same internet

Early YouTube

More like this

Related

Grouped by explicit relationships where evidence exists, and by shared theme otherwise.

Behind the record

Where it came from

There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens
A meme classified under space.
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