History Is A Cycle: How Wojaks Became The New Rage Comics

It's no secret that people tend to repeatedly consume the same or similar content as a way to experience nostalgia and comfort. While nostalgia reflects on the fond memories of beloved content with all the novelty that came with it, comfort stems from the lack of novelty and reliability of said content. This can be easily seen by looking at how many millennials and zoomers continue to watch and re-watch older television shows like The Office or Friends.

TV shows, games and movies are not alone in this, as memes also have a similar phenomenon in retreading old ground. These earlier concepts can be recreated in a modern way, such as Demotivational Posters and Twitter screenshots. A recent example of this reincarnation is how Wojak Comics are becoming a contemporary recreation of Rage Comics in both setup and ubiquity.

One of the most apparent examples of this concept is the latest trend Wojak’s are featured in: Time Travel: Is Invented / Men With a Time Machine. The meme itself is not exclusive to Wojaks, and in fact, was never really designed to be. The original version of this was a Girls vs. Boys style meme from early July this year, which was posted to Reddit with a picture of Running Arnold Schwarzenegger as the stand-in for "boys."

However, it wasn't until user Soviet_yakut created the first viral Wojak variant nearly a month later using the already popular meme format that we truly see this reincarnation of older meme themes. The reason this particular example is the cornerstone of this concept is that it shows how a meme was twisted from a unique, simple format into a more easily consumed style. The ability for ease of consumption is what binds the two through time, as Rage Comics and Wojaks are perhaps the most digestible memes of their era.

It's easy to see the relationship between the two in terms of setup, as most contemporary formats of Wojaks hearken back to the same four-panel style of Rage Comics. The original version of this iconic meme was a four-pane comic about toilet splash-back, and this paneling remained the most popular format regardless of what was depicted inside the panels.

In Wojaks, there is a similar echo in the more recent formats this year. Soyjaks vs. Chads looks similar to a four-pane comic with the Soyjaks and Chads essentially acting as individual panels. The format eventually morphed into a Girls vs. Boys-style, which would then be used in the aforementioned "Time Travel: Is Invented" memes. The reason the four panels are an important concept to note is how it narrows down consumption to a quick glance. From their namesake, memes trend towards the most shareable version of an idea, and this is why Wojaks have been able to be used across meme trends, subcultures and a wide range of topics.

The ever-increasing amount of Wojak variants act as yet another point of comparison to Rage Comics. All the multifaceted Wojaks, particularly the rapidly expanding Oomer Wojaks, suggest that there is a growing need to specialize Wojaks for a wider range of uses. Similar to how Rage Faces showcase an array of emotions, the ever-expanding Wojaks have filled in niches that the original could not.

A distinction noted by user theancienthawaiian on Funnyjunk, who posted an image comparing Wojaks and Rage Faces on earlier this year, further supports this notion. Another (since-deleted) post on the subreddit /r/Negareddit features a similar idea based on the comments. A popular Virgin vs. Chad meme comparing the two was posted by Redditor TequilaBay in recent months, with many comments in support of this comparison. The idea of comparing the two styles had already entered into the meme world at the beginning of the year and serves as a possible explanation as to why Wojaks began to echo Rage Comics en masse.

In the end, some of the various Wojak faces we see in such memes were already around during the "golden age" of Rage Comics, so why are they only now taking over? All factors point to the newest generation, zoomers, consuming memes combined with a year that's kept many online significantly more than usual. During the ongoing coronavirus pandemic many web users have spent considerably more time online, and this is reflected in memes.

Many popular formats this year have been simple, easy to digest, and thus rapidly shareable. Moreover, as zoomers are quickly becoming the primary pushers of content online, they know Wojaks more intimately than Rage Comics due to their more recent prominence. But online content rarely just "disappears," and many millennials continue to use Rage Comic lexicon or references in internet discourse. Thus, the clash of generations pushes the shared media towards an intersection point. Many millennials actively share Wojak memes out of a sense of nostalgia, while zoomers see them as a comfort and a reliable style. This intersection is why the trajectory of Wojaks parallels Rage Comics and will define a full generation of meme culture for years to come.

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