WutFace

About

WutFace is an emote on Twitch that features an image of Twitch staffer Alex “Goldenboy” Mendez. The photograph of Mendez features him with a look of shock and disbelief with an open mouth and visible confusion. In Twitch chat, the emote can be used in a variety of situations but is typically typed by viewers after a particularly weird or surprising event takes place on stream.

Origin

The original photograph used in the WutFace emote was pulled from a video on June 22st, 2014, when Mendez was seated in the audience during MLG Anaheim for game three of the series between OpTic Gaming and Team Envious in Call of Duty (captured in the video below around the 27-second mark).

Mendez, who was a well-known eSports commentator and host at the time, was watching the game when the camera panned to a closeup of him, which then led to him making the iconic face captured in the emote.

Shortly after the video captured this, the picture of his reaction was added to Twitch as a new global emote, seen in the Tweet from Mendez himself below on October 27th, 2014.

There is a new global emote on @Twitch! Type in WutFace and get this… pic.twitter.com/MLrL0ytDKK

— 𝙂𝙊𝙇𝘿𝙀𝙉𝘽𝙊𝙔 (@GoldenboyFTW) October 27, 2014

Spread

After the official announcement of the new emote, users on Twitch began to rapidly adopt usage of WutFace as a way to express shock and disbelief during streams.^[1]

Though originally used in a more serious fashion to show surprise to an event during gameplay (sometimes when something went wrong), the emote later became a way to react to something weird happening in the stream, whether something done by the streamer themselves or a viewer in the chat.^[2] An example of this is when a streamer makes a strange sound, viewers will often spam the chat with WutFace emotes.

Since this initial traction, WutFace has become one of Twitch’s most frequently used emotes with over 100,000 uses a day (according to stats from twitchemotes.com).^[3] As of January 2020, the emote is the platform’s 22nd most popular emote.^[4]

On the YouTube channel theScore esports, the channel released a video on March 15th, 2018, that tracks down the origin behind WutFace as well as discussing how it’s used (shown here). Although WutFace dates back to 2014, the video shows its persistent relevance years later while racking up nearly 100,000 views.

A clip on Twitch was posted to r/LivestreamFail on November 13th, 2019, and received upwards of 1,700 points (95% upvoted) within two months.^[5]

Examples

Search Interest

External References