Stressed Chika

Submission 47,964

Part of a series on Kaguya-Sama: Love is War. [View Related Entries]

About

Stressed Chika refers to several images of Kaguya-Sama: Love is War character Chika Fujiwara wearing expressions of suppressed frustration. Online, the images have been used in a multi-panel format to illustrate increasingly stressful situations.

Origin

On February 9th, 2019, episode five of Kaguya-Sama: Love is War anime series premiered in Japan.^[1] In part "Miyuki Shirogane Wants to Show Off" of the episode, character Chika Fujiwara attempts to teach character Miyuki Shirogane the basics of volleyball. Frustrated by the lack of results, Chika shows expressions of suppressed frustration at several points in the episode.

[This video has been removed]

Following the release of the episode, several users uploaded the scene to YouTube, with February 9th, 2019, upload by user ShanksTheYonko gaining over 67,000 views in four months.^[2]^[3]

On February 9th, Redditor redleg1002 posted the first known meme using the still images from the episode to /r/animemes subreddit, gaining over 7,500 upvotes (shown below).^[10]

Spread

On February 10th, 2019, Coub user dev posted a compilation of four Chika's expressions to the platform, with the video gaining over 66,300 views in four months (shown below).^[4] On February 14th and 15th, GIFs of Chika's expressions were posted to GIF-hosting sites Tenor and Gfycat.^[5]^[6]

On February 23rd, 2019, Redditor sablefeline2d posted a multi-panel meme using still images of the expressions to /r/Animemes subreddit (shown below).^[7] The post gained over 6,900 upvotes in three months.

In the following months, the format gained significant spread on Reddit, with notable posts appearing in /r/Animemes^[8] and /r/me_irl^[9] subreddits.