Ībout 1,500 Twitter accounts falsely posing as liberal activists with the NPC meme as a profile picture were suspended for allegedly spreading misinformation about the 2018 United States elections. This usage of the meme has been attributed to Donald Trump supporters. The meme gained media attention, initially in Kotaku and The New York Times, due to its usage in parodying the herd mentality of American liberals. In October 2018, a Wojak with a gray face, pointy nose and blank, emotionless facial expression, dubbed "NPC Wojak", became a popular visual representation for people who cannot think for themselves or make their own decisions, comparing them to Non-Player Characters – computer-automated characters within a video game.
Some variants paired him with the character Pepe the Frog (catchphrase "feels good/bad man") in what Feldman describes as a "platonic romance within the memescape". Wojak was also paired with the template phrase "that feel" or "that feel when", shortened to "tfw". The image spread to other imageboards, including 4chan, where by 2011 an image of two Wojaks hugging each other under the caption "I know that feel bro" gained popularity. Brian Feldman of Intelligencer describes Wojak's expression as "pained but dealing with it."
According to him, the image originally came from the Polish imageboard vichan, where it was posted with the filename "ciepła twarz.jpg" ('warm face'). "Wojak" was originally the nickname of a Polish user on the defunct German imageboard Krautchan, who started posting the image around 2010, often accompanied with lament about not having a girlfriend.
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