Polandball (meme)

"For the character, see Polandball"Polandball, alternatively known in general as countryballs, is an internet meme that consists of user-created cartoon comics, artworks, and communities. It satirizes countries and their political relations, personified as balls (excluding a few countries) with simple eyes and their flag as their skin (sometimes their clothing), interacting with each other mostly in poorly-written  English (Unless it is an  English speaking country), and exhibiting personalities derived from national and international opinions and stereotypes of them. The subculture and comics can be referred to alternatively as Polandball (even if  Poland does not appear in the comic itself) or countryballs and countryhumans.

The meme has officaly developed differently than many other internet memes in that it has a strong community of followers across many websites, but is not always completely known or understood outside of its communities. Regardless, Polandball has become a staple of many websites to depict international events. It has drawn the attention of scholars, front pages of websites and newspapers, game developers, politicians and ministries, and even celebrities, amongst other people.

Early History
Countries being depicted as balls and circles was not an idea that Polandball's creators invented. As such, Polandball has had several spiritual predecessors.

Bruno Bozzetto's Work on [[file:poland-icon.png]] Polandball
Polandball could have been inspired by the work of the Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto. In his cartoon "Italy vs Europe ", released in 1999, the European Union and Italy  are portrayed as circles. The works of Bruno Bozzetto are some of the first modern works depicting vast things, like genders and nations, as circles. His work also shares many of the same characteristics of Polandball, like manifesting creativity out of basic stereotypes. His work went viral quickly and may have become sediment for the first Polandball comics.

Drawball.com incident
The roots of Polandball can be traced to an event dubbed a 'cyber-war' among Polish Internet users on a website called drawball.com, which occurred in August 2009. The website, which offers a larger, circular-shaped virtual canvas, allows internet users to draw what they want on the canvas, based upon what has

previously been drawn by other users. The idea of ​drawing the Polish flag on the entire canvas rallied thousands of Polish 4chan users together, and they were able to paint the entire canvas with a red top and white below, with the word "POLSKA" written in the middle. This coordination devolved into drawball's familiar chaos soon afterward when it was raided by 4chan to cover it with a giant swastika.

Polandball's Beginnings
"The beginnings of the actual meme began a month later, on Krautchan, a German -language imageboard website" The first Polandball comics are attributed to a British user of Krautchan's English-speaking /int/ imageboard, dubbed "FALCO", who in September 2009 created the meme using Microsoft Paint to troll another user dubbed "Wojak". Wojak, a  Polish -British frequenter of /int/, was speaking of his poor employee contributions and nationalism for his former country in a rambling style. Eventually, he began talking about how superior Polish women are to women from other countries. FALCO created the first Polandball comics to satirize this, along with several others later, and they became the most foundational stereotypes attributed to Polandball. This caught the interest of many users of the board, who then began spreading and imitating FALCO's comics across the internet. Russians espoused it the most, themselves creating their own stereotypes of drunken enjoyment and obsession with making fun of Poland. These stereotypes were placed into the character Russiaball. In a similar fashion, many other stereotypes began forming for the various other characters of Polandball.

Later History
Polandball, after being established by the community from Krautchan, began spreading their works across other websites in addition to cementing the popularity on their home website. On Krautchan, the meme became so widespread that the managers and moderators of the website established markers for the anonymous users' home countries using countryballs instead of flags. This later became a feature among many other /int/ boards on other imageboards and is also an optional feature. (The rest of the end sentence was gone because of some lousy person who randomly put 'IT'S COUNTRYBALL NOT POLANDBALL')

Reddit
"To see the community, click here: r/Polandball (Note: This community has stricter standards than here and other Polandball Wiki communities.)"A large Polandball community is headquartered on Reddit. On Reddit is a "subreddit" named eponymously after Polandball. It currently has 546,451 subscribers around the world, mostly from America and Europe. It is known for its strict rules for how comics and comments are posted and shared. Many regard the subreddit as a source for high-quality comics, while others criticize it for its heavy moderation or its tendency toward a more complex style of art. Controversial rules include the banning and temporary banning of certain jokes and a heavy comment policy that bans the use of any meme (including subtle meme references and even having a meme title for a comic).

FANDOM
"Click here for the official Polandball Wiki."Another large community is on Fandom (not the one your on). The wiki is known to have less stricter rules and is mainly based of having a database of countryballs and planetballs whilst having a section to artworks and comics. There's also subdivisions of the wiki including Companyballs and Videogameballs. However, each of the wikis have slightly different rules and they all still follow the standard rules of drawing them.

Format
"See here for the official Reddit drawing tutorial"Polandball comics often have a specific style and language usage. Such examples are non-english speaking countryballs speak Engrish (broken English) and common phrases such as Poland cannot into space, gib clay (gib as in give) and REMOVE KEBAB!.