Forever Alone

Origin: FunnyJunk, May 2010¶

Forever Alone was uploaded by FunnyJunk user Azuul on May 28, 2010, in a thread titled “April Fools.” The first comic showed someone texting an ex an apology only to discover they had been pranked — and the final panel introduced the face that carried the punchline: a lumpy, crudely drawn crying grin, eyes squeezed shut, mouth stretched into a rictus of misery. Dictionary.com has credited illustrator Dominic Vanner with drawing it, though the original artist has never been definitively confirmed. Like every rage face of the era it was made in MS Paint, and its whole value was that it could be copy-pasted into any comic as a reusable reaction.

Spread¶

The face escaped its home site fast. A variant featuring a lonely salaryman circulated on 4chan in June 2010, and a Reddit post titled “Prom FFFUUUU” cleared 275 upvotes on August 5, 2010. By September 2010 FunnyJunk was returning over 23,000 image results for the face and Tumblr more than 50,000. Milestones piled up quickly:

• September 11, 2010 — the single-topic blog “Forever Alone Comics” launched.
• September 15, 2010 — /r/foreveralone was created, reportedly passing 25,300 subscribers within three years.
• December 2010 – January 2011 — advice-animal-styled versions appeared on macro generator sites.
• February 2013 — the Forever Alone Facebook page had accumulated over 7.2 million submissions.

The Times Square stunt¶

Between March and May 2011, users on 4chan and Reddit reportedly organised what they called an “involuntary flash mob”: fake OkCupid profiles were used to arrange dates with strangers at the same Times Square location and time, producing a crowd of people who had all been stood up simultaneously. It remains the most-cited example of the meme leaving the screen, and a fairly unflattering one.

Meaning and usage¶

The face punctuates the last panel of a rage comic about rejection, being single, or being excluded — never as genuine sadness, always as a joke the poster is telling on themselves. The exaggerated grin is the tell: real loneliness does not look like that, and the distortion converts the feeling into something shareable. The comics carrying it followed a fixed shape — three or four panels of hopeful setup, a small humiliation, then the face filling the final frame at maximum size. Because the drawing was a shared asset rather than any one artist’s property, anyone could assemble a strip in minutes, which is why the library grew as fast as it did. The face also worked with no comic at all, dropped into a forum thread as a single-image reply. Over time “forever alone” detached from the drawing entirely and became a standalone catchphrase, deployed around Valentine’s Day, group plans someone was left out of, and any moment of self-mocking singleness.

Legacy¶

Forever Alone is a cornerstone of the MS-Paint rage-face library alongside Rage Guy, Trollface, Y U No and Me Gusta. Rage comics collapsed around 2013 as reaction GIFs and screenshots took over, but this particular face survived the extinction because the phrase did. It carries a heavy nostalgic charge now — shorthand not just for loneliness but for the specific era of the internet that made it.