2010·The social era
Wojak
A bald, sad cartoon head that became the internet's whole vocabulary for how it feels to be a person.
You might remember it as Feels Guy, that feel when, I know that feel bro
A meme
This Moment spread as an image people copied and reposted, not as a video upload. Originally published on imageboard.
- SourceNot an upload originally
- MediaNot held by ViralWorld
What this was
A simple black-outlined drawing of a bald man with a wistful, resigned expression. It surfaced on the Polish imageboard Vichan as ciepłatwarz.jpg — warmface — and was carried to the German board Krautchan in 2010 by a poster called Wojak, whose name stuck. Paired with the phrase "that feel when", shortened to tfw, it became the standard way to caption a small private emotion.
It first appeared in 2010, during the social era.
Wojak is the most generative meme character of the 2010s. It does not have one joke; it has a face that can be redrawn into any state of mind, and the internet redrew it into hundreds — the NPC, the Doomer, the Coomer, the crying wojak, the soyjak, the chudjak. Where Pepe became a symbol, Wojak became a grammar.
The NPC variant was used in coordinated political misinformation before the 2018 US elections, and around 1,500 Twitter accounts using it were suspended. The character remains in constant daily use across imageboards, Discord and Twitter, mostly by people who have never heard the name Krautchan.
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Related
Nothing related yet. Relationships are recorded where evidence supports them, not inferred from similarity.
Behind the recordWhere 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 imageboard.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
- What happens
- A simple black-outlined drawing of a bald man with a wistful, resigned expression. It surfaced on the Polish imageboard Vichan as ciepłatwarz.jpg — warmface — and was carried to the German board Krautchan in 2010 by a poster called Wojak, whose name stuck. Paired with the phrase "that feel when", shortened to tfw, it became the standard way to caption a small private emotion.