No copy of this image is currently available to show.
This Moment spread as an image people copied and reposted, not as a video upload. Originally published on deviantart.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
The MS Paint face that gave internet trolling a picture of itself.
What this was
A leering, wide-mouthed face drawn in Microsoft Paint, used to mark the moment a joke was at somebody else's expense. It was one panel of a rage comic called Trolls, drawn on 19 September 2008 by Carlos Ramirez, an eighteen-year-old college student in Oakland, and published to his deviantART page under the name Whynne.
It first appeared in 2008, during early YouTube.
Trollface is the oldest and most widely recognised of the rage faces, and the one that escaped the format. Ramirez's comic was mocking trolls; the face was immediately adopted by them, and became the universal shorthand for deliberate provocation online. Ars Technica's 2012 field guide to rage faces treats it as the anchor of the whole vocabulary, and it has since appeared on Turkish football terraces, in a Black Mirror episode, and on hijacked Russian military radio frequencies.
Ramirez registered Trolls with the US Copyright Office in 2010 and told Kotaku in 2015 that licensing it had earned him over $100,000, with peak months around $15,000 — an early demonstration that a meme could have an owner, and that the owner could enforce it. A Wii U game was pulled for using the face without permission.
More from 2008
- Maru the cat The story 2008Early YouTube
- Pepe the Frog Look 2008Early YouTube
- 11foot8 bridge The story 2008Early YouTube
- Christian the Lion The story 2008Early YouTube
- Simon's Cat The story 2008Early YouTube
- Boxxy The story 2008Early YouTube
- 2008Early YouTube
- Literal music video Source gone 2008Early YouTube
- Trapped in an Elevator for 41 Hours The story 2008Early YouTube
- Wombo Combo The story 2008Early YouTube
Early YouTube
- Kelly Shoes The story 2007Early YouTube
- Lolcat The story 2007Early YouTube
- Bilibili The story 2009Early YouTube
- r/IAmA The story 2009Early YouTube
- Dove Evolution The story 2006Early YouTube
- Nico Nico Douga The story 2006Early YouTube
- Grass Mud Horse The story 2009Early YouTube
- I'mma let you finish The story 2009Early YouTube
Where it came from
There is no original upload to identify: this Moment did not begin as one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is the record.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This Moment spread as an image people copied and reposted, not as a video upload. Originally published on deviantart.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- A leering, wide-mouthed face drawn in Microsoft Paint, used to mark the moment a joke was at somebody else's expense. It was one panel of a rage comic called Trolls, drawn on 19 September 2008 by Carlos Ramirez, an eighteen-year-old college student in Oakland, and published to his deviantART page under the name Whynne.
- When
- The sources below date the original to 2008-09-19. ViralWorld records this as a cited claim rather than an established publication date, because it holds no copy to check it against.