I Love Wojaks
Overview
No matter where you go, any group of people you come across will have their own culture. Interestingly enough, the internet is no exception to this. Internet culture started exploding around the 2010’s with memes (maybe even a few years before that), and ever since as more people have adopted the internet across the world it has also grown in cultural power.
One unique facet of internet culture that I adore are doodles called “Wojaks”. There are several different subtypes of these drawings too: soyjaks, brainlets, etc. These little doodles were spawned from the “Feels Guy” created by Christian Grodecki (you can read more about it in this article:
https://www.nssmag.com/en/fashion/21372/how-wojak-became-the-meme-of-the-moment
They are usually made anonymously, and usually portray a someone that the artist is either parodying or mocking. In some recent cases, there have also been a sort of anonymous ‘decentralized narrative building’ format too. This basically means an anonymous user tends to make something that’s really funny, and others will do their own narrative thread building off of the base image and tell a story with it.
The best example is the “Wojak with his fat girlfriend” series of images where people created storylines building off of the idea of a character who is in a casual relationship with a heavy set woman but is ashamed of her. What started as a funny image, turned into a viral moment where users were creating multiple images telling stories that built off the initial image and exploring the different levels of shame the character was going through (or the artist, retelling their own stories through this artistic vehicle).
Is it offensive? Yeah. Is it hilarious? Very much so.
There are hundreds and potentially thousands of these scribbles and they are incredible. There seems to be a wojak for every aspect of human existence. From the common emotions one might feel like love or shame, to deeper and far more specific situations like the aforementioned “Wojak with his fat girlfriend” series, and even horoscope style personalities. If you’re interested in seeing some of these images, you can find a decent, but not exhaustive library at this website (but there are other websites you can see as well):
I remember coming across “Feels Guy” many years ago, but it wasn’t until around 2017-2018 that I came across the name “Wojak”. This was due to a co-worker mentioning them to me (thanks Mike).
Ever since I found out what these little drawings go by, I have grown an almost obsessive compulsion to save them onto my phone when I come across a memorable one in the wild. I’m almost ashamed of sharing my photos with people because they’ll see that my photo library is filled with about a 1/3 of stupid internet drawings. In fact, one of the reasons why I’ve upgraded my iPhone’s cloud storage, is so that I could have quick access to seeing and using these images. Fun fact about me, but I had a very bad habit of arguing with people anonymously (I actually don’t like being anonymous, but some people will actually try to kill you if you make them mad enough). If an argument went down a particularly stupid path, I would bless my opponent with “brainlet”, letting them know quickly what I thought of them.
I admit it wasn’t a mature thing to do, but there’s only so many words you can use to express to someone who is being willfully obtuse (these are the only situations where I’ve used them by the way).
Anyway, all of this to say that for as long as I’ve been on the internet, these little drawings rank as some of the best stuff you could find. They’re some of the most charming and culturally persistent artifacts of the web at large and I’m always happy to see what new things that the internet subconscious conjure up.
Here is a gallery of some of my favorites. Feel free to download them and add them to your own collection:
Outro
What I like about them the most is that they are raw and illustrate an honesty that most other art forms lack these days (we live in an era of political correctness and it has made art boring and stupid). Nothing says ‘I felt so strongly about something’ like taking time to draw out your feelings with a computer mouse. They are made all the more charming by their low technical skill. These drawings express a new type of art form, one thats accessible to any and everyone and completely decentralized. It captures the zeitgeist in a way that only art can and I think its incredible that we can still see novel expressions of the boundless creativity of the human spirit
-Until next time-