Trollface or Troll Face is a rage comic meme image of a character wearing a mischievous smile, used to symbolise internet trolls and trolling. It is one of the oldest and most widely known rage comic faces. [1] [2]
Trollface or Troll Face is a rage comic meme image of a character wearing a mischievous smile, used to symbolise internet trolls and trolling. It is one of the oldest and most widely known rage comic faces. [1] [2]
Trollface was drawn in Microsoft Paint on September 19, 2008, by Carlos Ramirez, an 18-year-old Oakland college student. [3] [4] The image was published on Ramirez's DeviantArt page, "Whynne", [4] as part of a rage comic titled Trolls, about the pointless nature of trolling. [5] [6] Ramirez posted the image to the imageboard website 4chan, where other users began to share it. [3] [7] In the following months, Ramirez's drawing quickly gained traction on 4chan as the universal emoticon of an internet troll and a versatile rage comic character. From 4chan, Trollface spread to Reddit and Urban Dictionary in 2009, [4] [5] eventually reaching other internet image-sharing sites such as Imgur and Facebook. [5]
In March 2021, Ramirez announced his intention to sell a non-fungible token for Trollface. [8]
Trollface shows a troll, someone who annoys others on the internet for their own amusement. [2] The original comic by Ramirez mocked trolls; [3] however, the image is widely used by trolls. [9] Trollface has been described as the internet equivalent of the children's taunt "nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah" or sticking one's tongue out. [9] The image is often accompanied by phrases such as "Problem?" or "You mad, bro?" [10]
On April 8, 2015, Kotaku ran an in-depth interview article with Ramirez about his now-iconic rage comic character. [3] In the article, Ramirez estimated that since registering Trolls with the United States Copyright Office on July 27, 2010, he had earned more than $100,000 in licensing fees and other payouts associated with Trollface, including from licensing for shirts emblazoned with the face being sold by the retail chain Hot Topic, with monthly revenues reaching as high as $15,000 at its peak.
In addition, Ramirez also offered a backstory behind the removal of the video game Meme Run for Wii U for copyright infringement for including Trollface as the main character. [3] [11] Trollface is protected by copyright, but is not trademarked. [12]
Trollface was described by La Tercera as "the father of memes". [4] A bust of Trollface was exhibited at the Mexico City museum Museo del Meme. [13]
In March 2012, a viral video showed a banner emblazoned with Trollface and the word "Problem?" being used by fans of the Turkish Second League football team Eskişehirspor to protest a rule change. [14]
In the Black Mirror episode "Shut Up and Dance", the blackmailers send Trollface photographs after they leak the victims' secrets in spite of their compliance. [15]
In February 2021, Rebecca Black released a remix of her 2011 song "Friday" to celebrate its 10th anniversary, with the song's music video featuring several rage comic characters, including Trollface. [16]
In slang, a troll is a person who posts deliberately offensive or provocative messages online or who performs similar behaviors in real life. The methods and motivations of trolls can range from benign to sadistic. These messages can be inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic, and may have the intent of provoking others into displaying emotional responses, or manipulating others' perception, thus acting as a bully or a provocateur. The behavior is typically for the troll's amusement, or to achieve a specific result such as disrupting a rival's online activities or purposefully causing confusion or harm to other people. Trolling behaviors involve tactical aggression to incite emotional responses, which can adversely affect the target's well-being.
An Internet meme, or simply meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations. Characteristics of memes include their susceptibility to parody, their use of intertextuality, their propagation in a viral pattern, and their evolution over time. The name is from the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972.
4chan is an anonymous English-language imageboard website. Launched by Christopher "moot" Poole in October 2003, the site hosts boards dedicated to a wide variety of topics, from video games and television to literature, cooking, weapons, music, history, anime, fitness, politics, and sports, among others. Registration is not available and users typically post anonymously. As of 2022, 4chan receives more than 22 million unique monthly visitors, of which approximately half are from the United States.
Rickrolling or a Rickroll is an Internet meme involving the unexpected appearance of the music video to the 1987 hit song "Never Gonna Give You Up", performed by English singer Rick Astley. The aforementioned video has over 1.5 billion views on YouTube. The meme is a type of bait and switch, usually using a disguised hyperlink that leads to the music video. When one clicks on a seemingly unrelated link, the site with the music video loads instead of what was expected, and they have been "Rickrolled". The meme has also extended to using the song's lyrics, or singing it, in unexpected contexts. Astley himself has also been Rickrolled on several occasions.
Encyclopedia Dramatica is a satirical online community centered around a wiki that acts as a "troll archive". The site hosts racist material and shock content; as a result it was filtered from Google Search in 2010. An administrator of the website was the perpetrator of the 2017 Aztec High School shooting, and users of the site frequently participate in harassment campaigns.
A rage comic is a short cartoon strip using a growing set of pre-made cartoon faces, or rage faces, which usually express rage or some other simple emotion or activity. They are usually crudely drawn in Microsoft Paint or other simple drawing programs, and were most popular in the early 2010s. These webcomics have spread much in the same way that Internet memes do, and several memes have originated in this medium. They have been characterized by Ars Technica as an "accepted and standardized form of online communication." The popularity of rage comics has been attributed to their use as vehicles for humorizing shared experiences. The range of expression and standardized, easily identifiable faces has allowed uses such as teaching English as a foreign language.
Doge is an Internet meme that became popular in 2013. The meme consists of a picture of a Shiba Inu dog, accompanied by multicolored text in Comic Sans font in the foreground. The text, representing a kind of internal monologue, is deliberately written in a form of broken English. The meme originally and most frequently uses an image of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, though versions with other Shiba Inus are also popular.
Meme Run is an endless running video game created by American indie developer Ninja Pig Studios for the Wii U console's eShop service. The game features extensive use of Internet memes; for example, the player character is a stick figure with a trollface for a head, and the levels are made up of Lenny faces. The game was designed to appeal to both hardcore and casual audiences, but has been widely criticized both before and after its release for its perceived low quality.
/pol/, short for Politically Incorrect, is an anonymous political discussion imageboard on 4chan. As of 2022, it is the most active board on the site. It has had a substantial impact on Internet culture. It has acted as a platform for far-right extremism; the board is notable for its widespread racist, white supremacist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, misogynist, and anti-LGBT content. /pol/ has been linked to various acts of real-world extremist violence. It has been described as one of the "[centers] of 4chan mobilization", a title also ascribed to /b/.
Pepe the Frog is a webcomic character and Internet meme created by cartoonist Matt Furie. Designed as a green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body, Pepe originated in Furie's 2005 comic Boy's Club. The character became an Internet meme when his popularity steadily grew across websites such as Myspace, Gaia Online, and 4chan in 2008. By 2015, he had become one of the most popular memes used on 4chan and Tumblr. Different types of Pepe memes include "Sad Frog", "Smug Frog", "Angry Pepe", "Feels Frog", and "You will never..." Frog. Since 2014, "rare Pepes" have been posted on the "meme market" as if they were trading cards.
Matt Furie is an American comics artist and illustrator. He is known for creating Pepe the Frog, a character from his Boy's Club series that debuted in 2005. The anthropomorphic character became a popular Internet meme in the late 2000s and early 2010s. After the meme was co-opted by the alt-right in 2015 and designated a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League in 2016, Furie campaigned to reclaim the character, pursuing copyright infringement cases against its use in hate-related contexts.
DreamWorks Animation's Shrek franchise, based on William Steig's book of the same name, has an underground Internet fandom that started around 2009.
"Loss", sometimes referred to as "loss.jpg", is a strip published on June 2, 2008, by Tim Buckley for his gaming-related webcomic Ctrl+Alt+Del. Set during a storyline in which the main character Ethan and his fiancée Lilah are expecting their first child, the strip—presented as a four-panel comic with no dialogue—shows Ethan entering a hospital, where he sees Lilah weeping in a hospital bed after suffering a miscarriage. Buckley cited events in his life as inspiration for the comic.
Bowsette or Koopa-hime, is a fan-made, moe anthropomorphized and gender-swapped version of the Mario franchise character Bowser, in which he is transformed by the Super Crown power-up to resemble the franchise character Princess Peach. The character was originally created on 19 September 2018 by Ayyk92, a Malaysian online artist, as part of a comic strip which he posted to Twitter. Bowsette subsequently became an internet meme and rose in popularity internationally, with related hashtags in English and Japanese trending on Twitter; several professional Japanese artists contributed their own renditions of the character on the website.
Wojak, also known as Feels Guy, is an Internet meme that is, in its original form, a simple, black-outlined cartoon drawing of a bald man with a wistful expression.
The NPC, derived from non-player character, is an Internet meme that represents people who do not think for themselves or do not make their own decisions; those who lack introspection or intrapersonal communication. The meme gained further viral status on TikTok, with the surge of "NPC Streamers". In terms of politics, it's often been used by those with anti-establishment views to describe those who fail to question authority, "groupthink", or a stance that would display conformity and obedience. The NPC meme, which graphically is based on the Wojak meme, was created in July 2016 by an anonymous author and first published on the imageboard 4chan, where the idea and inspiration behind the meme were introduced.
"It's Over 9000!", also known as simply "Over 9000!", is an Internet meme that became popular in 2005, involving a change made for English localizations of an episode of the Dragon Ball Z anime television series titled "The Return of Goku", which originally aired on April 19, 1997. The phrase is typically used as an innumerable quantifier to describe a large quantity of something. Variations of the phrase are also employed as a form of trolling.
/b/, also called random, is an anonymous imageboard on 4chan. It was the first board created during the establishment of the platform in 2003, and it then stood for "anime/random". While /b/ permits discussion and posting of any sort of content, the community etiquette is to self-limit discussion on /b/ of those topics that are specialties or the focus of other boards on 4chan. /b/ is one of the most popular imageboards on 4chan, next to /pol/. Due to its popularity and notoriety, it overshadows the website with a bad reputation. The Washington Post described /b/ as "an unfathomable grab-bag of the random, the gross and the downright bizarre".
Ebola-chan is an Internet meme depicting a moe anthropomorphization of the Ebola virus and was popularized on 4chan. The first known image of Ebola-chan began on the Japanese social media site, Pixiv, in 2014. A few days after, it was posted 4chan's /pol/ thread, who began posting messages praising Ebola-chan. Soon after, 4chan users began spreading the meme to Nairaland, the largest online message board in Nigeria, accompanying images of Ebola-chan with racist messages and associated conspiracy theories. This included claims that Ebola was CIA-made and that white people were performing rituals for Ebola to spread. The meme's spread has been considered racist and has been attributed to increased mistrust between West Africans and medical professionals.
