Polandball: nationalism done right
The internet and nationalism are a dangerous mix.
If you don’t believe me, try this experiment: go on an online message board, and pretend to be the biggest Anglophile in the world. Gush over how sexy the English accent is, or how much you love English tea, or how great the new season of Doctor Who is. Then count how long it takes for an Irishman to jump in and tell you that the English are a bunch of murderers and rapists who eat babies for breakfast.
This can be applied to any country. Pick either Japan or South Korea, and talk about how great their cultural exports are (either anime or K-Pop, depending on what you picked). Don’t forget to mention how superior one country’s technology is to the other. No matter what country you picked, citizens from the other won’t hesitate to tell you that their country is superior, and the other one pales in comparison to their country’s countless great achievements.
I could go on, but you get the picture. Nationalism is everywhere on the internet. And while most of the time it dissolves into unproductive bickering and ugly flame wars, sometimes it can produce something beautiful (that is, if you consider crudely drawn circles with flags as “beautiful”).
In 2009, a group of Polish users hijacked the canvas on Drawball.com, a website that allows users to draw on a huge circular canvas. Despite many attempts to fend them off, the Poles managed to cover the entire canvas with the Polish flag, and even wrote “Polska” in the center of it.
This inspired a British user named Falco, on the German message board Krautchan.net. Falco used MS Paint to draw a ball resembling an inverted Polish flag who spoke in broken English to mock a Polish user named Wojack and his less-than stellar English. His drawing proved popular, and many of the forum’s Russian users started drawing their own memes. And just like that, an internet phenomenon was born.
As of this writing, Polandball has over 350,000 fans on Facebook, while the Polandball subreddit has 682,716 subscribers. Although it was created to mock Poles, Poland is now just one of many characters. Almost every country in the world has been turned into a ball, along with some supranational organizations (i.e. the European Union and the United Nations), as well as land that is not represented by any government (i.e. Antarctica).
While the community is largely informal, what little rules exist must be followed to the letter. For example:
- Artists can not use the circle-tool in MS Paint. All characters should be hand-drawn (the crude appearance adds to the appeal)
- Aside from eyes, the balls cannot possess any human attributes, including hair, limbs, or mouths
- Non-Anglospheric countries must speak in broken English
- Poland must always be drawn upside down
- A few countries are never drawn as balls. Israel is represented as a three-dimensional cube, due to “Jewish physics.”
Nepal is depicted as a monster with jagged teeth who communicates through fearsome roars.
Singapore, for reasons unknown, is a triangle known as “Tringapore”.
- Some countries must be drawn with accessories. USA is always drawn with a pair of sunglasses:
While UK is always drawn with a top hat and a monocle:
Other countries are occasionally drawn with accessories (i.e. Mexico is sometimes drawn with a sombrero) but they are not required.
- Countries with a coat-of-arms on their flag (such as Serbia, Slovenia, and Slovakia) sport eye-patches. Austria-Hungary is depicted with two eye-patches, making him completely useless.
One of the more bizarre characters in Polandball is the Omsk Bird. The Omsk Bird is a separate meme that originated on Russian image boards, used to ridicule inhabitants of the city of Omsk as drug users. The Omsk Bird has appeared in several Polandball comics, and is essentially regarded as a Polandball character.
One of the most famous running gags in the comic is the “Poland cannot into space” gag, which dates back to the first comics created by Falco. The “cannot into” gag is also applied to other countries (i.e. “Greece cannot into monies” or “Estonia cannot into Nordics”.)
Polandball has no official canon, since the personalities of the countries are shaped by the individual artists. However, a few countries have pretty consistent portrayals:
- USA is loud, rude, boastful, can never remember the names of other countries, and loves to stuff his face with burgers.
- Serbia is a violent maniac who is obsessed with killing Muslims and Turks (referred to in the Polandball universe as “kebabs”)
- France is rude and arrogant, and is constantly mocked for surrendering during World War II. Sometimes depicted as the “wife” of Germany.
- Germany is hard-working, bureaucratic, and still harbors guilt for his past actions as Nazi Germany. Sometimes depicted as the “husband” of France.
Occasionally, Germany will revert into the “Reichtangle” and attempt to anschluss other balls.
- UK is portrayed as an old gentleman who is sadly reminiscing about his glory days as an empire. Sometimes depicted as the “father” of USA.
- Similarly, Russia is often stumbling around in a vodka-induced stupor, reminiscing about his glory days as the Soviet Union. He often tries to restore his former glory by bullying smaller countries around him, including Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states. He is also portrayed as being jealous of USA’s superpower status, and is constantly scheming to take him down a peg.
- Finally, the title character, Poland, usually bears the brunt of the strip’s humor. He is often depicted as UK’s put-upon plumber, or trying and failing to get into space. He is also the frequent victim of bullying by Russia.
Now at this point you might be scratching your heads and saying, “well, what makes Polandball so great? It’s just a comic with a crappy art style, repeating tired stereotypes we’ve all heard before!”
The answer is that Polandball has accomplished a nearly impossible task: it’s provided a space on the internet for nationalists of all stripes. It’s impossible to be offended by Polandball, because it makes fun of everyone equally, on a global scale. No matter what flag we live under, we can all agree that no country is perfect, and every country is deserving of ridicule — even our own. Especially our own. And when we learn to laugh at our own countries imperfections, we can learn to laugh at our own imperfections. We can laugh at each other, and at ourselves. That just might be the key to world peace.
I’ll conclude by leaving a few links to some of the best Polandball comics: