Wojak

Origin

Wojak is a black-and-white line drawing that looks like it was made in MS Paint: a bald man wearing a hollow, sorrowful expression. It first appeared not in Germany but on the Polish imageboard Vichan, under the filename "ciepłatwarz.jpg" — "warm face." The earliest archived appearance dates to December 16, 2009. Who actually drew it has never been established.

Its life as a reaction image began after that. A user going by "Wojak" took the image from Vichan and posted it repeatedly to the German-language imageboard Krautchan, with the earliest archived post dated April 26, 2010. The name therefore comes not from the artist but from the person who kept posting it; "wojak" is Polish for something like soldier or warrior. The lineage is documented in the Know Your Meme entry on Wojak.

Spread

The real spread happened on 4chan. There the face became inseparable from phrases like "I know that feel, bro," "that feel," and "that feel when," which also earned it the nickname "Feels Guy." Its whole utility was standing in, with a single image, for emotional states that are tedious to articulate.

Wojak has since become less a character than a face template, since swapping the expression, clothing, and props yields a new type. Prominent examples include the Doomer, embodying despair and nihilism; the NPC Wojak of 2018, mocking people as parroting others without critical thought; the Tradwife, standing for traditional gender roles; and the Soyjak, caricaturing a supposedly weak masculinity. As these derivatives got used for political satire and social commentary, the format spread far beyond its original job of simple emotional expression.