The origin
Users built short strips in Microsoft Paint from a growing shared library of pre-drawn faces, each carrying one fixed emotion.
How it spread
They dominated Reddit and imageboards from roughly 2009 to 2012, and the faces outlived the strips.
What it means
A shared visual vocabulary anyone could draw badly. Trollface and Wojak both came out of this world.
Follow the source
Short editorial summary written by Random Access Memes from the sources above; the wording is ours, not theirs. Every link was checked for a live response on September 13, 2026.
