Forever Alone

About

Forever Alone is an exploitable rage comic character that is used to express loneliness and disappointment with life. The face has also been used as an advice animal and inspired the creation of the snowclone template “Forever an X.”

Origin

Forever Alone is considered one of the first major rage comic spin-off characters to be creater after the original Rage Guy, which first sprang up on 4chan in 2009. According to various sources, the original comic was uploaded in a thread titled “April Fools” by FunnyJunk user Azuul on May 28th, 2010 (shown below).

Spread

In early June 2010, another instance featuring a bachelor salaryman was posted on 4chan (shown below, left). On August 5th, 2010, Redditor L_E_G_E_N_D posted a Forever Alone rage comic titled “Prom FFFUUUU”^[14] (shown below, right), receiving over 275 up votes and 70 comments prior to being archived.

 

By September 2010, there were over 23,000 image results for “Forever Alone” on FunnyJunk^[3] and over 50,000 on Tumblr.^[4] On September 11th, single topic blog Forever Alone Comics^[19] was launched to curate the growing collection of four-pane comics. On September 15th, the /r/foreveralone^[23] subreddit was created, which received over 25,300 subscribers in the next three years. In early October, Forever Alone received mentions in several blogs, including Geekosystem^[5], Memebase^[15] and Uproxx.^[16] Meanwhile, the meaning of term “Forever Alone” gradually expanded from a rage comic reference to the more general statement of being alone. On February 13th, 2013, the International Business Times^[22] published a slideshow of notable Valentine’s Day Forever Alone comics and image macros. As of February 2013, a Facebook^[21] page titled “Forever Alone” has received over 7.2 million submissions.

Notable Examples

In the beginning, most rage comics were illustrated with the the basic four-pane template, but later grew into other formats like vertical comic strips, advice animals, multi-pane comics with dialogues and even animated GIFs.

Rage Comics