Images getting traced is not a new concept. In fact, there is a long and extensive history of image tracing. If you knew somebody who was artistic in your childhood or wore the proud title of an art kid yourself, then you’ve vaguely seen or done the classic scheme of tracing images off a computer. There was always some kid who had stuck a piece of paper to the school computers in the computer lab and decided to trace some photograph or an illustration. While they could’ve printed it out and cut off the watermark, it just wasn’t provable enough to say it was yours, which made tracing the more convincing way to label work as yours. Some people did this to look like they made that work themselves, but some people do it to make fun of others. And they do these drawings so abnormally crude, that it becomes a work of art.
This phenomenon of art has been granted a name: Wojak. The depiction of Wojak includes a depressive, almost neutral-looking bald man drawn via MS Paint. Most people who have encountered Wojak, may have also heard the character referred to as Feels Guy.
The word Wojak originates from the Polish language and loosely translates to soldier or fighter. The reason this was the chosen title correlates to it having allegedly been the name of the user who had discovered the image, someone named Wojak. Rumors have it that the image was found on the imageboard site named Vichan, but there is no distinct evidence of it having been first seen there. While it’s unknown where exactly the drawing originated from, given that there is a lack of documentation of the image, the earliest archived media featuring the Wojak was on December 16, 2009. This archived piece was a comic panel titled I Wish I Was Home, submitted to a website called Sad and Useless. In this panel, it depicts a person standing in a corner of a room where 4 other people are dancing at a party. This stranded character was Wojak, who said in the comic: “I wish I was at home playing video games. The music is too loud. My feet hurt. I’m hungry.”
User Wojak submitted the picture of the Wojak character onto a German imageboard called Krautchan, where the image was much more popularized. It became so popular that the image became internationally known through various other imageboards like 4chan and became recognizable as Wojak or Feels Guy. The name Feels Guy comes from the people who commented on the character’s expression once it was brought to a widescale audience. Many of these commentators found the melancholic, poorly-drawn, blank-looking MS Paint character relateable. Because Wojak attracted a great amount of people who have felt such a way before, whether it be attitude-wise or through the non-social gaming aspect, Wojak was attributed to the acronym TFW (That Feeling When).
Wojaks can also be seen through its variants. There are many depictions of Wojak, whether it be slightly altered with a title, a combination of Wojak and popular memes from the 00’s, or completely different alterations depicting different groups of people, or strange hybrids of all of the above. Because of all its variants, it’s likely that at some point in your life, you have seen a Wojak.
