What Is a Soyjak?
A soyjak is a drawn caricature of a man, typically bespectacled, bearded, and making an exaggerated open-mouthed expression of excitement.
It’s a variant of the Wojak meme family, adapted to mock what internet communities characterise as performative or inauthentic enthusiasm, particularly among men deemed insufficiently masculine by the communities using it.
The name merges “soy” (as in soy milk, invoking the associated “soy boy” insult) with “Wojak,” the name of the original template figure the character is drawn from.
The Wojak Connection: Understanding the Template
To understand soyjak, you first need to understand Wojak. The “Feels Guy,” as Wojak is also known, is a simple, crudely drawn bald man whose face has been adapted into dozens of emotional states including sadness, smugness, despair, and contentment, since the original image emerged around 2010 on Polish imageboards before spreading to 4chan and beyond.
Wojak became a kind of universal blank canvas for online emotional expression. Soyjak is one branch of that tree, distinguished by its specific physical features (glasses, open beard, gaping mouth) and its mocking rather than empathetic purpose.
Soyjak Origins: Where Did It Come From?
The soyjak caricature emerged on 4chan’s /r9k/ board around 2017–2018. The original drawing was based on a real photograph: a man photographed making an open-mouthed excited expression that circulated on Reddit and became associated with YouTube thumbnail culture, where content creators would pull exaggerated faces to drive clicks.
The drawing took that expression, exaggerated it further, and attached it to the existing “soy boy” discourse that was already circulating in certain online communities at the time. From /r9k/, the image spread rapidly across 4chan’s boards before reaching Reddit, Twitter, and mainstream meme accounts.
The parallel term “soy boy”, used to describe men perceived as soft or lacking traditional masculine traits, is rooted in a pseudoscientific claim that consuming soy products, which contain phytoestrogens, can raise oestrogen levels in men and cause feminisation.
Multiple peer-reviewed studies have found no credible evidence for this. The science does not support the premise, but the insult had already embedded itself in online vocabulary long before the research was widely circulated.
The “Soy Face”: What It Actually Represents
The soyjak’s defining feature, the exaggerated open-mouthed grin, maps onto what critics call the “soy face” or “soylent grin.”
This expression became a shorthand for performative enthusiasm, particularly associated with YouTube thumbnails, unboxing videos, and consumer product reactions where creators exaggerate their excitement for engagement.
The critique isn’t simply about masculinity. At its core, the soyjak image targets what users perceive as artificial or corporate-driven excitement: the person who performs delight rather than feels it.
This is why it spikes reliably around specific cultural moments: a new PlayStation reveal, a Marvel trailer drop, an Apple keynote, a Nintendo Direct.
Threads filling with soyjak edits within minutes of a trailer going live became their own recurring format on Reddit’s gaming and film communities. The implication running through all of it is that enthusiasm for mass-market products is inherently hollow, and that anyone expressing it publicly is performing rather than feeling.
Every Major Soyjak Variant Explained
One of the reasons soyjak has stayed relevant is its adaptability. The original drawing spawned dozens of distinct variants, each targeting a different archetype or serving a different rhetorical function. Here are the most widely recognised:
Classic Soyjak: The original drawing. Visually: round glasses, patchy beard, and a wide-open mouth with visible teeth, suggesting uncontained excitement. The expression reads as someone reacting to a product reveal or pop culture announcement with more enthusiasm than the situation warrants. Used to mock uncritical consumer enthusiasm in almost any context.
Chudjak (Chud): The angry counterpart to classic soyjak. Where the classic soyjak has wide, excited eyes and an open mouth expressing enthusiasm, Chudjak has a narrowed, hostile expression, a receding hairline, and a clenched or sneering mouth. The visual contrast is deliberate: one figure is too eager, the other too angry. According to some documented accounts, the Chudjak drawing is often claimed to be based on a photograph of Patrick Crusius, the perpetrator of the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting, and originated on 4chan’s /pol/ board where it was used to mock users for their far-right tendencies. The “chud” label, which some connect to the 1984 horror film C.H.U.D. (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers) as a secondary folk etymology, stuck as a general term for reactionary internet archetypes. Unlike the original soyjak, Chudjak has been deployed across political lines: left-leaning users use it to caricature the reactionary right, while right-leaning communities adopted and reclaimed it, using it to mock their own stereotype back at critics.
Pointing Soyjak: Two classic soyjak figures facing each other, each with one arm extended and index finger pointing at the other. The figures are typically mirror images of the same base drawing rather than a newly designed variant. The format has a documented real-world origin: on February 23, 2020, vegan activist John Oberg tweeted a photo of himself and a friend standing in front of a Beyond Fried Chicken sign at a KFC in Charlotte, North Carolina. Both men were making the open-mouthed soy face expression. The image spread on 4chan through early 2020 before going viral in October 2020 when it was reposted and redrawn as a soyjak template. The format is used to indicate that two supposedly opposed parties are making identical arguments, that someone is being hypocritical, or that two things the community considers equally embarrassing have been identified in the same space.
Cobson: The most visually distinct of the major variants. Where classic soyjak uses relatively thin, scratchy linework, Cobson has a rounder, larger head relative to its body, heavier and more confident line weight, and a somewhat smoother drawing style that gives it a different aesthetic register. The eyes are typically rounder and more cartoonish, and the mouth is still open but rendered with less jagged detail than the classic. It originated and spread primarily within Soyjak.party rather than the broader imageboards, which gives it a more community-specific feel. Because its visual identity is strong enough to be recognisable on its own, it became a base for further sub-variants rather than just a remix of the classic template.
NPC Soyjak: A hybrid of the soyjak and NPC meme formats. Visually, the face is rendered in flat grey rather than the usual skin tone, and the eyes are blank or replaced with small, empty dots rather than the expressive eyes of the classic. The mouth may be open in the soyjak style or rendered as a flat, affectless line depending on the specific edit. The grey colouring and empty eyes are borrowed directly from the NPC meme, which depicted people as featureless video game background characters incapable of independent thought. Combining it with soyjak doubles the insult: the target is not just performing enthusiasm but doing so without any genuine inner life behind it.
Wholesome Soyjak: Uses the same base drawing as the classic but with the expression softened: the mouth is closed or showing a gentle smile rather than a gaping grin, and the eyes are sometimes rendered with a warmer, less manic quality. It emerged partly as an ironic counterpoint to the aggressive application of the classic, used in contexts where communities mock the performative positivity of certain online spaces (Reddit’s “wholesome” culture being a common target). The joke relies on the reader recognising the soyjak template underneath the softened expression: the wholesomeness is itself treated as a kind of performance, making the variant self-referential.
Gigachad Soyjak (hybrid formats): Soyjak is frequently paired with the Chad or Gigachad figure in “Virgin vs Chad” style comparison memes, where soyjak represents the inferior, anxious position and the Chad figure represents effortless confidence. The contrast between the two characters is central to how both memes function.
Soyjak.party: The Community Behind the Variants
Much of the variant ecosystem can be traced to Soyjak.party, an imageboard founded in September 2020 by users from 4chan’s /qa/ board after it was banned. Known informally as “The Party” or “The Sharty,” it functions as a dedicated community for users to post, rate, and build on new soyjak variants.
Most memes don’t get their own dedicated website with a searchable archive. Soyjak did. The site maintains a wiki of variants and has been the origin point for some of the most widely circulated soyjak edits that later spread to Twitter and Reddit, often without users knowing where they came from.
Soyjak vs Chad: The Core Dynamic
Soyjak doesn’t exist in isolation. It operates partly as the visual opposite of the Chad meme. Where Chad (and the more extreme Gigachad) represents hyper-confident, idealised masculinity, soyjak represents anxious, performative, consumer-driven identity.
The “Virgin vs Chad” format, placing soyjak-type figures on the left labelled negatively, with Chad figures on the right labelled positively, became a template in its own right, used to contrast any two opposed positions in culture, politics, or fandom. Understanding soyjak without understanding its relationship to Chad misses half the picture.
Soyjak in Political Discourse
The “soy boy” insult migrated from imageboard subcultures into political commentary, where it became shorthand in certain communities for dismissing political opponents as weak or effeminate. It has been used primarily by right-leaning online spaces to mock liberals, environmentalists, and vegans.
More broadly, soyjak itself has been used in political memes across the spectrum. Its flexibility means it has been deployed by communities with contradictory politics to mock each other, which dilutes any clean ideological reading of the image.
It is now less a symbol of one political tendency and more a general-purpose mockery tool that gets applied to whoever the user wants to dismiss.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a soyjak? A Wojak-derived caricature of a man making an exaggerated open-mouthed excited expression, used to mock performative enthusiasm. See the full definition above.
Where did the soyjak meme come from? It originated on 4chan’s /r9k/ board around 2017–2018, adapted from a real circulating photograph. The full origin story is covered in the Origins section above.
What is the difference between a wojak and a soyjak? Wojak is the parent template: a minimal, emotionally expressive drawing used for empathy and self-identification. Soyjak is a specific branch of it, repurposed for mockery rather than relatability.
What does “soy boy” mean? An online insult connecting soy consumption to perceived lack of masculinity. The underlying biological claim has been debunked by peer-reviewed research.
What is Soyjak.party? The dedicated imageboard community (launched around 2020–2021) that became the primary hub for creating, cataloguing, and remixing soyjak variants.
What is Chudjak? The angry soyjak variant, often claimed online to be based on a photograph of the 2019 El Paso shooter, originating on 4chan’s /pol/ board as a way to mock far-right users. The “chud” label has since been applied more broadly and used by opposing political communities to mock each other. Full details in the Variants section above.
Why Soyjak Has Lasted So Long Online
Soyjak has outlasted most of the trends it originally mocked because it does something specific well: it names a feeling that a lot of people have but rarely articulate.
That feeling is the suspicion that enthusiasm, particularly public, online enthusiasm for products and entertainment, has become a performance.
The open-mouthed face is legible to anyone who has scrolled past enough clickbait thumbnails or watched a crowd lose its mind over a trailer for something that turned out to be mediocre.
What makes it durable is that the critique it embeds keeps becoming more relevant, not less. As content gets more algorithmic, thumbnails get more exaggerated, and fan reactions get louder and more managed, the soyjak keeps finding new things to point at.
The irony is that the image itself has become exactly what it mocks: a reflex, deployed automatically, by people performing scepticism just as performatively as the thing they’re mocking.
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