A Guide to Children’s Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: What Is “wojak”?
School is almost back and young people’s collective energy seems more focused on new backpacks and water bottles (North Face and Stanley are cool brands, respectively) than anything else, so it’s been a slow week. In other words, it’s the perfect time to take a deep dive into one of the internet’s most popular meme formats: Wojack.
Wojack’s Universe Explained
Over the past decade and a half, the Internet’s collective wisdom has created Wojaks: simple drawings that serve as a pictographic language that is almost universally understood by Internet users but a mystery to almost everyone else. So let’s get you up to speed.
First, the definition: “Wojak” in Polish means “soldier”, but on the Internet, “Wojak” refers to drawings of people that are used either to react to something, or in combination with other Wojak to express more complex ideas.
The original Wojak was a drawing of a nondescript bald man that first appeared online around 2009. It seems deliberately neutral, and in the early days it was often used to express “I feel for you” in memes like:
Wojaks quickly grew in popularity, and soon users began posting variations of the original drawing, depicting different people or stereotypes.
Here are some of the most commonly used categories of wojaks and their meaning:
Wojak : The original Wojak was usually used as a visual representation of the “common man”, the person behind the screen.
Crying Wojak A crying Wojak symbolizes a person who does not get his way.
NPC : This Wojak appeared around 2018 and is named after computer-controlled video game characters. It is intended to refer to a person who cannot think for himself.
Coomer : This variant of the wojak represents a person who masturbates too much. He is often depicted with an overly muscular right arm.
Doomer : Doomer-vojak represents a person who is depressed or nihilistic.
Chad : This wojak features a very attractive man.
Soyjak : The opposite of a chad, a soyjak is a beta male.
Big Brain : This trope is almost always used ironically to ridicule people who are considered pseudo-intellectuals. The most popular “big brain” has a brain so large that he uses it as a chair.
CHUD : CHUD wojaks were originally meant to make fun of the alt-right, but they quickly adopted it.
Trad wife : A depiction of a woman who adheres to traditional gender roles.
Masks : A crying leader wearing a smug mask often appears. It says something like, “You’re actually upset, even if you pretend you’re not.”
There are many other categories of wojaks and endless individual variations of designs. The ones that “work” (that is, the kind of people who spread memes) remain, and the less useful options are forgotten.
People use Wojak memes to express a wide variety of ideas, but they often boil down to “why people like me are better than others” as shown below:
But Wojaks are versatile enough that they can be used to make the exact opposite statement:
While Wojaks began as a way for an online user to present themselves as an anonymous, ordinary person, more recent variants of Wojaks are almost exclusively designed to mock others instead. It’s interesting how Chad also replaces the original Wojak, because Chad in memes usually means “cool guys like me think like this”, where Wojak is a much more modest self-insertion.
What does “o7” mean?
If someone responds to you online with the word “o7”, they are greeting you. This is an emoticon used in chats to say something like “yes sir/ma’am” or as a general greeting/or farewell. It is often used in online games when the game ends to say, “It has been an honor to serve with you.”
Ask ChatGPT to roast your Instagram feed
A hot trend at the moment is to ask ChatGPT to roast your Instagram feed. It’s ridiculously easy to do. Here’s how it works:
1) Take a screenshot of your Instagram feed.
2) Login to ChatGPT.
3) Click on the paperclip and upload a screenshot.
4) Say “roast my Instagram.”
5) Enjoy grilling.
I had to try it, and although I don’t usually like AI, I was interested to see how it criticized my Insta (see photo above).
As expected, most of its “hotness” is average and obvious, for example:
But, I admit, I was a little hooked by this:
(It was actually our child’s friend’s bar mitzvah.)
Viral Video of the Week: A$AP Rocky – Tailor Swif (Official Video)
I can’t even begin to describe the greatness of A$AP Rocky’s “Tailor Swif” video. It only went up an hour ago (as I write this) but I’m sure by the time you read this it will go very viral. It’s so funny, weird and otherworldly that it requires you to watch it three or four times in a row before forwarding it to your friends.
Directed by Vanya Heymann and Gal Muja, shot on location in Kiev, Ukraine, two months before the Russian invasion, Tailor Swif is a constant barrage of surreal imagery, a combination of questions: “Can you find 10 things wrong with this picture? ” the drawings we all loved as children and the films of Luis Buñuel. It’s kind of a masterpiece and you should watch it right now before you do anything else.