Rage faces or rage comics are images created in Paintbrush that depict particular facial expressions. In general, Paintbrush edited images are considered to be amateurish compared to images crafted using professional editing software such as Photoshop. Thus, "rage" imagery is considered to be synonymous to amateurism in terms of visual aesthetics and its origins. The result is of course, is that it conveys the message that anyone is able to contribute to the community by easily creating memes. However, the popularity of rage expressions extends beyond its simplicity; original memes can develop into a number of metamemes. Each is represented by the core image as its central concept but portrays a different emotion of behaviour.
This comic originated on the 4chan forums as the "FFFUUUU rage guy" and as the name suggests, the image was mostly about circumstances that led to anger or frustration. While most "rage" faces are not used to express rage, the name has been used due to their rage guy origins. Among the most notable rage faces are: "Rage Guy", "Troll Face", "Forever Alone Guy" and "Y U No Guy". The concept begun to spread rapidly when Reddit launched a sub-platform allowing users to submit their own rage creations. As a result of its popularity, templates were developed allowing users to create memes featuring rage faces with better ease. These faces are not only characters and are also representations of emotional states, to portray particular messages. The significance of rage memes is that they are mostly utilised to talk about everyday issues as opposed to being generated as a result of movie premiers, historical sporting moments, international incidents, and so on.
The rage style has continued to evolve by incorporating well known cultural figures into the design scheme. To date, there have been several rage style memes using the faces of U.S president Barack Obama, actor Jackie Chan and basketball player Yao Ming.
Most of the stories portrayed in rage memes are everyday tales, so therefore it can be argued that they serve as a way to seek connection with others by talking about issues and situations concerning everyday life through memes. Compared to written texts, macro images adds the notion of visual interaction and people are invited to co-create and to think about what message it is trying to convey. Although the specific example of a roughly sketched image might seem outlandish, rage comics and internet memes in general, as the online world’s cultural artefact helps to illuminate how people express values and share interests, which then leads to the enablement of critical judgment within web-memberships and in some cases, the creation of activism movements.
