About

Picardía, also known as Strawman Ball, Memeball or Thumbs Up Emoji Man, is a series of image macros featuring a 3D illustration of a smiley face making a thumbs-up gesture. While initially popularized on the Argentinian website Taringa, customized versions of the character mocking a variety of political ideologies began circulating on 4chan in August 2016.

Origin

Picardía was originally taken from EmotiGuy,^[1] an app for designing Emojis. In 2014, Picardía began circulating on Taringa, where it was open captioned various Spanish language in-jokes (shown below).^[2] The character was subsequently nicknamed Picardía ("mischievous" in Spanish) on the internet humor site.^[3]

Spread

On December 8th, 2015, an English language version of the image macro was posted in a thread on 4chan's /int/ (international) board (shown below).^[4]

In August 2016, variations of the image using the yellow and black colors from the Swedish AnarkoKapitalistisk Front flag began circulating on Reddit^[5] and 4chan,^[6] featuring captions mocking anarcho-capitalism (shown below).

Shortly after, additional variations of the smiley face began appearing on 4chan, with each customized to mock stereotypes associated with other political ideologies (shown below). ^[7]

On November 20th, a thread referring to the images as "Strawman Ball" was posted on 4chan's /pol/ board,^[8] where many users replied with variations of the image macro (shown below). The name is based off the straw man informal fallacy, in which a misrepresented version of an argument is refuted in a debate. The following day, a similar thread was posted on /pol/.^[7]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References