Cтpaнo Шapы / Russian Polandball

About

Cтpaнo Шapы (Russian for "Country Balls") is a set of comics based off of Polandball created sometime in or before 2016. Due to being perceived as not humorous, it was made fun of on 4chan's /int/ board and spawned a set of memes revolving around it. These mostly used to mock Russia and in rare cases, other countries.

Origin

As of right now, there has been an inability to locate exactly where the original comics were shared. But it is likely it was on Russian-owned social media such as VK or other russian-speaking parts of the popular web. Posts on 4chan allege that it was created by the Russian government.

Lone posts on 4chan about the comic appeared in early 2016,^[1] but the comics came to fame upon their later 2017 spread. Users were mystified if the translation was bad or if the comics were as unfunny as they appeared. Due to featuring a lot of upfront Russian nationalism and denigration of other countries, particularly of western ones, it prompted anonymous users to make fun of it.

T-I-G-E-R-S

"T-I-G-E-R-S" or "Did you know that we have T-I-G-E-R-S?" is a catchphrase and snowclone originating from a Cтpaнo Шapы comic wherein two Russia balls exclaim that Russia is very big and has everything including tigers.

Anonymous users found this boast extremely pointless, resulting in many parodies of the comics including the ball versions of the tigers. The comic is parodied either completely humorously or to make fun of vain flexing of various kinds, such as being able to go to "S-P-A-C-E."

In usage, the full comic is quoted, usually with Russia or another country boasting about something pointless or humiliating, in other cases bringing attention to interesting things in an ironic fashion.

Rapist Poland

In the comics, Poland is often shown as very paranoid of Russia and appears either very angry or dumb. 4chan users took the idea of this Poland and turned the "bufoon" that was in the comic into a primitive barbarian who had his way with Russia and his tigers.

On October 22, 2017, a user posted an image of a Poland having finished raping a tiger.^[2] Spurring the creation of several traditional edits wherein it would be Russia who would be raped. Sometimes the nations were completely switched, making it Vietnam and the USA instead. Due to the 2014 invasion of Crimea, some variants include Ukraine instead of Poland. This became more common after the 2022 war between Ukraine and Russia.

Spread

On 4chan, the first thread to ignite interest in the comics came from an anonymous Finnish poster at September 11, 2017.^[3] He asked "Can someone explain this joke to me? I dont get it, why does the robot explode?" in relation to one of the comics he had found. Afterward, dumping several more.

The same thread was later recreated^[4] with the same image and thread title twice^[5] over the course of the month by what was likely the same Finnish poster.

While the spread of the Cтpaнo Шapы comic had been going on since then, the first spread of the exact same image appearing on /pol/ would be in early 2018^[6] with many edits and other comics appearing earlier than that.

As of 2022, there are have been approximately 8000 posts across many boards on 4chan mentioning "T-I-G-E-R-S"^[7][8] or "S-P-A-C-E,"^[9][10] which does not take into account image reposts or edits.

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References