Shirtjak / Soyjak Wearing "I ♥ X" T-shirt

About

Shirtjak, also known as Soyjak Wearing "I Heart X" T-shirt or Soyjak Wearing "I Love X" T-shirt, refers to a Soyjak character pointing at its own shirt which has text reading "I ♥ X" with the "X" being replaced with any word. The exploitable character spread on Soyjak.party and 4chan in 2022, later spreading to memes and discourse on Twitter, among other social media sites, in 2023, being associated with Oddly Specific Wojaks and absurd Wojak Comics.

Origin

According to the Soyjak Wiki,^[1] Shirtjak was drawn to represent, "a soyboy sporting a t-shirt of the Overwatch® team Dallas Fuel sponsored by Jack in the Box®." The image in question (shown below) was a screencap from a 2019 competitive Overwatch game between the Dallas Fuel and the Houston Outlaws. The match was discussed on /r/Competitiveoverwatch^[2] on April 28th, 2019, and included a comment posted by Redditor^[3] TheArabicCowboy that said, "Nice little fan representation of this match," and linked to an Imgur^[4] page that showed two fans from either team, one of them being the "soyboy sporting a t-shirt of the Overwatch® team Dallas Fuel" that the Shirtjak comic was based on. Redditor^[3] TheArabicCowboy's comment gained over 610 upvotes in four years and the Imgur^[4] page gained over 1,200 views.

On April 29th, 2019, the screencap was posted to Reddit's /r/OverwatchTMZ^[5] subreddit by Redditor WadeyCakes, captioned, "Chad Fuel vs. Virgin Outlaws," gaining over 620 upvotes in four years. On April 30th, 2019, the image was also shared to 4chan's /r9k/^[6] imageboard.

Despite a 2019 origin, the original, Soyjak version of the man wearing a Dallas Fuel shirt wasn't uploaded to SoyBooru^[7] until March 30th, 2022, showing the Soyjak pointing to his own shirt that read "Soy," making a Soy Face and wearing glasses while being bald (shown below). It is currently unknown where the original Shirtjak was uploaded. Additionally, the first Shirtjak to read some variant of "I ♥ X" was uploaded to SoyBooru^[8] on April 17th, 2022, reading a racial slur and showing a heart with a transgender flag. A likely origin of both images is Soyjak.party's /soy/ or /pol/ imageboards, however, the original threads have not been discovered.

Spread

The aforementioned "I ♥ X" Soyjak was shared on 4chan's /his/^[9] board in June 2022. Going into 2022, various versions of Shirtjak were posted to SoyBooru^[10] under the "variant:shirtjak" tag, many of which revolved around problematic viewpoints based on racism, xenophobia and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments.

On August 15th, 2022, a Shirtjak that was Sour Patch Kids-coded was shared to SoyBooru,^[11] wearing a shirt that said, "I ♥ Sour" (shown below, left). On October 28th, 2022, a Shirtjak in the shape of a spork with a shirt reading, "I ♥ Sporks," was posted to SoyBooru^[12] (shown below, right).

On December 13th, 2022, Twitter^[13] user @necesthery tweeted the "I ♥ Sour" Shirtjak with the caption reading, "how mad do yo uhave to be at someone to make this image," gaining roughly 20,400 likes in five months (shown below, left). Going into 2023, similar tweets were posted with similar sentiments. For instance, on January 21st, 2023, Twitter user @violemt (since-suspended) tweeted the "I ♥ Sporks" Shirtjak, captioning it, "in what situation would anyone need this," gaining roughly 310,000 views in one day (shown below, right). On January 22nd, 2023, iFunnyer^[14] @GammaPup posted a screenshot of the tweet, gaining roughly 5,400 smiles in four months.

Going into May 2023, roughly 240 Shirtjak variants were posted to SoyBooru.^[10]

Various Examples

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External References