When we look forward, we see darkness around the corner. Call it whatever you like—climate crisis, rising authoritarianism, Mark Zuckerberg’s secret nuclear war bunker in Hawai’i—but it’s the biggest influence on internet culture. The world is ending, and here you are spending the closing act of human civilization… scrolling on TikTok?
That sense of mental dissonance and despair is in the water we drink. I’ve written before about how this vibe annoys me, but it’s still worth looking into. Even if you reject it, it’s on your feed. And if there’s any one character representing this feeling, it’s Doomer Wojak. And Doomer’s evolution over time follows an evolution in how people feel about the end of the world.
Who Is Doomer?
Doomer originated around 2018. Visually, he is a Wojak with a hat, hoodie, and cigarette added onto his line-drawn face.
The Wojak tradition by 2018 was about a decade old. The character was first posted around 2009, and through the early 2010s developed into a kind of mass self-portrait of people posting on 4chan and similar places. In this sense, early Wojak is similar to Pepe the Frog.
Like Pepe, Wojak’s face is emotionally expressive: he is known as “That Feels Guy.” The earliest Wojak meme format shows him standing alone at a party, and later developments also focus on his solitude and high amounts of screen time. This one is a prime example of a meme that isn’t trying to be funny: often, they’re just about things or feelings.
Interestingly, the Wojak of 4chan is not some strong figure, but a weak, lonely, and emotional one. The self-identification is also a form of self-deprecation. Representing yourself as Wojak means representing yourself as vulnerable and socially isolated. And that’s where a lot of the close bonding of these politically noxious communities comes from: people sharing their pain.
Doomer comes about in 2018, as a new variant on Wojak:
The example above, from September 2018, is identified by Know Your Meme as the earliest findable origin. The addition of accessories—hat, hoodie, cigarette—to Wojak participates in a pattern that was already well-established by 2018 of modifying everything around the Wojak to make it represent new types of character, while keeping the same face and art style. The cigarette marks him a self-destructive, while the hoodie and hat, both black, mark him out as somber figure.
The thirteen phrases floating around the Doomer aren’t exactly narration by the meme maker, nor dialogue said by Doomer — they are his inner monologue. There’s narrated actions (“/nightwalk/”) and judgments he’s passed on himself, or thinks other have passed on him like “Hasn’t made a friend since 2012” and “No hope of career advancement.” They are a catalogue of woe and alienation.
Doomer is part of a larger system of “-Oomer” type Wojaks, which include ones like 30 Year Old Boomer, Groomer, Coomer, Soomer, etc. Frequently, the foil of Doomer in early Doomer memes is the “Bloomer” Wojak, who smiles and wears the same hoodie as Doomer but in a different color, and has abandoned the cigarette and hat. Bloomer is optimistic and more mature, ideally the person Doomer will be in a few years.
In Doomer, the effects of cynicism and dread for the future manifest in an inability to start living. What could be thought of as purely personal problems (substance abuse, romantic frustration, depression, etc.) are instead interpreted as symptoms of the coming “doom.” One of the messages at the core of Doomer is “it’s not your fault.”
This attitude is unhealthy — Doomer should stop smoking cigarettes, learn how to talk to girls, and get his life together. You can’t blame everything on carbon emissions. But at the same time, it’s a little bit accurate: the personal is political, after all.
Now, it might be cringe to take a feminist slogan like “the personal is political” and apply it to 4chan posters. But for the people representing themselves as Doomer, personal despair is the result of a political process. The inverse is also true: political processes result from personal feelings. Very few of these people are politically radical out of real experience or observation of how the world works; they get there because of feelings of woe and alienation which are structurally created by the economy, the internet, and the culture.
One of the things that’s so troubling and fascinating about 4chan memes is the way they purposefully reject social life and other people. Whether it’s Wojak brooding alone in the corner at a party, or some repugnantly racist Pepe that makes you nauseous, the memes show a compulsion to reject all that is normal, all that can be shared with the broader world. They just delve deeper into that bad feeling, which is the only way they have of making community.
Wojak Comics: Doomer in Relation to Others
Prior to 2020, Wojak (from my perch on the internet) still felt like a “4chan meme.” It had that vibe of violently rejecting the imagined “normie” looking at it. In early examples of Wojak memes, you don’t have to dig too deep to find the racism and sexism (for example, the original posting of “Bloomer” has a reference to a Nazi marching song in it.)
But in the months right before the pandemic started, in early 2020, there were suddenly a whole bunch of Wojak Comics memes on Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter, which featured Doomer as one of an ensemble of characters. I started to see him everywhere, in the mainstream, posted by normie meme accounts, even leftist ones. This one below is a favorite of mine:
I am happy that Doomer finds love.
But what’s most interesting is the emergence of Doomer’s female counterpart, Doomer Girl. Like Doomer, she is composed of the core Wojak face altered to meet a new archetype, with lipstick, a choker necklace, and blush added. She ends up being more used than Doomer in these later Wojak Comics formats, and her associations start to veer further than just “worried about the apocalypse.” She becomes a representation of “modern woman,” particularly when contrasted with Trad Girl, as in the meme below:
My theory about what makes Wojak more mainstream around 2020 is the addition of explicitly female Wojaks. Prior to Doomer Girl and Trad Girl, there were very few widely used female Wojaks — and if they did exist, they were insulting sexist stereotypes. The mass self-portrait of Wojak was almost always male, and it was almost always isolated (unless it was with other sad male Wojaks.)
Through Wojak Comics, the “Doomer” vibe is detached from maleness. It is brought into a larger social world: Doomers exist in relation to each other and to their opposite pair of Yes Chad / Trad Girl — as well as other characters:
Of course, narrative Wojak formats did not begin in 2020 with the Wojak Comics trend. Nor are they anything original in memes — these are, essentially, updated Rage Comics using the same four-panel form and repeating many of the same concerns (notably gender) that Rage Comics talked about. Neither do I mean to argue here that Doomer and Trad Girl are victories for female representation in memes.
But in the evolution of Doomer into Doomer Girl, I see hope.
Facing Doom Together
Doomerism is a way of viewing your life as unbeginnable and broken. But in Wojak Comics, it can also be a way of situating yourself in solidarity with a community of people who feel the same way. These memes take it as a given that things feel bad, but there’s fun to be had anyways. There’s a kind of Doomerism that has you dancing with somebody instead of standing in the corner — or, at least, has you standing in the corner thinking nicer thoughts:
We all know it’s late at the fair. The booths are closing down, and the parking lot is studded red by the tail-lights of people who have a place to go. You’re standing there with your befuddled friends, eating a hunk of cotton candy and watching somebody else’s house burn. It sucks, but you can still choose to not be a jerk.
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