How Did "New Guy" Become The Decade's First Huge Meme?

While the world woke up hungover on New Year's Day looking ahead to the new decade through bleary eyes, Twitter was getting flooded with pictures of a jolly, bald-headed cartoon fellow who seemed to be extolling positive virtues. Judging from his apron, he appeared to be a coffee shop employee, and could only be identified by his nametag: New Guy. He seemed to appear out of nowhere, yet immediately he had claimed the title of the first meme of the 2020s.

The character originated in a strip from webcomic artist Mallorie Jessica Udischas, aka sweetbeans99, published just a few weeks before it went viral. In the strip, a purple-haired character laughs about a "millionaire gamer-bro douchebag" who was recently robbed, a clear reference to PewDiePie getting burglarized in early December 2019. Enter "New Guy," the character's apparent coworker, who says, "Hey, how'd you like it if you were robbed?" The purple-haired character then sarcastically remarks that she and the "new guy" could be friends. He says "Wow, really?" She says "Hell no."

The comic certainly isn't charming or funny. The punchline appears to be that people who empathize with PewDiePie's plight are worthy of ridicule. Even if one is not a fan of PewDiePie and felt a sense of schadenfreude in his misfortune, the comic still comes off needlessly mean-spirited and hostile. While hostility towards famous people has been the lifeblood of the internet since, oh, forever, it's rare that one person's take captures as huge a swath of attention as sweetbeans99 did with her comic.

On New Year's Day, popular YouTuber OneyPlays reposted the comic on his Twitter account, writing, "I wanted to start my year good but this was the first thing I saw today." The appropriate way to read the strip was clearly against what sweetbeans intended: for most, "New Guy" was a good and empathetic character, and the purple-haired main character was unlikeable and misanthropic.

The exploitable edits started coming shortly after, a familiar response considering how internet users usually react to comics they don't like. Unlike most webcomic memes, however, sweetbeans' strip evolved with a twist: instead of coming together to solely to dunk on sweetbeans' point of view, memers elevated New Guy into a wholesome bastion of understanding, encouragement, and empathy.

This was a relatively unprecedented development in webcomic memes. Most "bad webcomic" memes follow a familiar path: the artist posts their doomed strip, gets mocked to hell, and harassed, often if the artist is a woman, and the whole affair leaves a bad aftertaste, even if the memes were good. In the case of sweetbeans' strip, she is a trans woman who laughed at PewDiePie, a massively popular YouTuber who is known to have a rabid fanbase. The stage was set for an ugly backlash, one all-too-familiar with netizens of the 2010s.

Instead, the resulting fallout was headed off by a community of artists who, although they disagreed with the premise of sweetbeans' strip, used New Guy as a mouthpiece for kindness, empathy, and anti-harassment. Perhaps influenced by the recent surge in popularity of Gatekeeping Yuri comics, which alter popular comic strips featuring two opposing characters such that the characters are dating, artists drew pieces of New Guy fan art encouraging others not to harass sweetbeans and instead practice understanding.

This resulted in a fascinating battle, as memers with opposing viewpoints began fighting over the soul of New Guy. There were allegations of harassment and iterations of the character with SJW strawmanning, the unfortunate expected result of the developing meme. Meanwhile, others continued to work to remove New Guy from that context completely and use him solely as a force for good, painting him as a modern Good Guy Greg offering encouragement and presenting arguments against harassment. New Guy evolved from a webcomic strawman into the center for a mini-online cultural war.

At present, the New Guy drama seems do have died down some. Top tweets under the "New Guy" Twitter search come from several days ago, and memers have moved on to other, perhaps more pressing matters. If the world has truly moved on from New Guy, he nevertheless has served as an interesting kickoff to memeing in 2020, becoming the focal point for a storm of hot-button issues like toxic fandom, YouTubers, and transphobia, but above all, a symbol of kindness and empathy. If New Guy suggests anything, it's that how people define "kindness" and "empathy" may define the new year in memes.