YMMV / Rage Comics

• Discredited Meme: The whole concept, to a certain extent. Varies based on what parts of the internet you frequent. Although as seen in Popularity Polynomial below, the characters are still being used, albeit often in ways that satirize or mock the old Rage Comic format.
  • However, it has made some occasional comebacks, like the Cover Yourself In Oil Troll Science comic, or the horror oriented Trollge Incidents.
• Memetic Mutation: The faces used in Rage Comics (e.g. Trollface) can be found all over the internet. In fact, throughout the first half of The New '10s they were pretty much synonymous with "meme", which may be why they were revived in The New Twenties despite the rage comic format being a Discredited Meme by that point.
• Memetic Troll: Who else but Trope Codifier Trollface?
• Popularity Polynomial:
  • By the latter half of The New '10s, rage comics had basically disappeared, and were widely accepted to have outright died out by the middle of the decade, being succeeded by "dank memes". But since late 2020-early 2021, Trollface has been fully revived in mainstream meme circles. Unlike the previous uses that treat him more as a character, however, the more recent Trollface memes largely use edited versions of him as a reaction image (such as the "Trollge"), fully lean into the Insane Troll Logic associated with the character (i.e. "Cover Yourself in Oil"), or create outright disturbing versions of him (frequently treating it as a Humanoid Abomination attempting to take over the web), fitting with the aforementioned "dank memes". These videos go into more detail.
  • Some other characters such as Derpina occasionally pop up in modern memes as well, although most of these are usually made to deliberately harken back to the mythical era of rage comics.
• Song Association: Following several viral videos in 2021 featuring the character, Trollface has become associated with Tally Hall, especially the song "Ruler of Everything".
• Spiritual Successor: Wojaks and their offshoots such as Yes Chad (which, despite only achieving mainstream use many years later, actually originated around the same time as Rage Comics) are also simplistic MS Paint-esque images that originated on 4chan and are also frequently used in comics to convey a situation or caricature someone, and saw a jump in usage around the late 2010s, by which time the Rage Comics had basically died out. The◊ similarities have not been lost on some.

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