Soyjak Pointing
TL;DR · Origin‘Soyjak Pointing’, more precisely Two Soyjaks Pointing, shows two soyjaks side by side, mouths open and eyebrows raised, pointing at the same thing. The soyjak is…
Origin
‘Soyjak Pointing’, more precisely Two Soyjaks Pointing, shows two soyjaks side by side, mouths open and eyebrows raised, pointing at the same thing. The soyjak is a Wojak-family character drawn to mock people who get excessively excited about trivial things.
The original is not a drawing but a photograph, posted on February 23rd, 2020 by the X user John Oberg (@JohnOberg), taken at a KFC in Charlotte, North Carolina, holding nuggets of the plant-based Beyond Fried Chicken. Oberg holds the nuggets while another man points at the signage, both open-mouthed and delighted. The tweet took some 450 retweets and 2,100 likes over eight months.
Spread
The photo was traced into soyjak form on May 1st, 2020 by an anonymous user on 4chan’s /qa/ board, producing an exploitable template whose caption and target could be swapped freely. Through May it moved across /an/, /co/ and /int/, with later documented use on /v/ on August 22nd and /tv/ on September 4th.
The decisive spread came on October 20th–21st, 2020, when Oberg reposted the original photograph and Twitter erupted at how exactly the two men’s faces matched the soyjak drawing, carrying photo and drawing along together. In June 2021 a wave of redraw variations revived it again.
Variants
A separate meme with a confusingly similar name is ‘Shirtjak’, or Soyjak Pointing at Shirt, in which a soyjak points at the ‘I ♥ X’ text on its own shirt. Its source is a broadcast screencap from a 2019 Overwatch League match between the Dallas Fuel and the Houston Outlaws; that capture was discussed on Reddit on April 28th, 2019 and on 4chan’s /r9k/ on April 30th, and the soyjak version was uploaded to SoyBooru on March 30th, 2022. The pointing finger makes the two easy to conflate, but they differ in both origin and date.
Sources
- Know Your Meme, ‘Two Soyjaks Pointing’ — John Oberg’s original photo of February 23rd, 2020 (a Charlotte KFC, Beyond Fried Chicken); the 4chan /qa/ redraw of May 1st, 2020; the Twitter spread of October 20th–21st; the June 2021 redraw revival
- Know Your Meme, ‘Soyjak Pointing at Shirt / Shirtjak’ — the 2019 Overwatch League screencap origin, Reddit on April 28th and 4chan /r9k/ on April 30th, 2019, and the SoyBooru upload of March 30th, 2022
- Wikipedia, ‘Soyjak’ — the character’s nature and its place within the Wojak family
