Angry NPC Wojak

Origin

Angry NPC Wojak is a four-panel comic format in which the grey-faced NPC Wojak, after being refuted, silently furrows its brow in anger. The underlying idea goes back to a 4chan /v/ thread titled ‘Are You an NPC?’ posted on July 7th, 2016, which compared people who follow group thinking and trends without judging for themselves to non-player characters in video games. The grey Wojak drawing attached to that idea only appeared two years later, in early September 2018 on 4chan.

The specifically angry variant became its own format on October 13th, 2018. That day an image of an NPC Wojak with furrowed eyebrows was posted to Reddit’s r/memeconomy and earned 76 upvotes (the post has since been deleted); another version posted to r/memes the same day earned 117 upvotes. On April 21st, 2019, a dedicated Imgflip generator template was created, turning the format into something anyone could mass-produce by swapping the captions.

Usage

The structure has three beats. In the first panel the grey NPC makes a claim; in the second, a white-coloured character refutes it; in the last, the NPC cannot answer and only furrows its brow. In short, it depicts someone who has lost the argument but refuses to admit it and is merely upset.

• Mocking an opponent in an online argument who repeats the same line without evidence
• Pointing at someone parroting an opinion borrowed wholesale from others
• Caricaturing the reaction when a belief taken for granted inside one’s own camp is broken

One caveat: the context of this meme is politically contaminated. Ahead of the 2018 US midterm elections, NPC memes were used as a dehumanising device that cast people of a given political leaning as beings incapable of thought, and outlets including Kotaku and The New York Times covered that critically. That said, Angry NPC Wojak itself spread as something both camps turn back on each other, and it is just as commonly used in apolitical taste disputes and gaming-community squabbles.

Variants

The whole Wojak family works by taking one original drawing and spinning off variations that change only colour and expression, so NPC Wojak split into a blank default, the angry version, and crowd versions with many figures lined up. In Korean communities the phrase ‘acts like an NPC’ settled in before the grey-faced drawing did; the image itself mostly arrived alongside posts importing overseas memes.

Sources

• Know Your Meme, ‘Angry NPC Wojak’ — earliest r/memeconomy and r/memes examples of October 13th, 2018; Imgflip template dated April 21st, 2019
• Know Your Meme, ‘NPC Wojak’ — the 4chan /v/ thread ‘Are You an NPC?’ of July 7th, 2016; grey Wojak of September 2018
• Wikipedia, ‘NPC (meme)’ — spread around the 2018 US midterms and press coverage
• Kotaku, ‘How The NPC Meme Tries To Dehumanize SJWs’ — critical reporting on its use as a dehumanising device