We have these /comfy/ threads on /r9k/, I’m sure most of you already know what I’m talking about. To the one or two who don’t though, essentially people will post art, photos, music, and tell little anecdotes that in one way or another have this common feeling of “comfy” linking them all together. Of course the word comfy, or comfortable, is far older than 4chan but the way it is used makes the /comfy/ of 4chan a unique idea. It’s a little like this Danish word. See in Denmark they have this word hygge, and there doesn’t seem to be a direct translation to English but from what I’ve read it describes a general feeling of cosiness/ warmth gotten from certain activities. So, drinking a hot chocolate while it snows outside or sitting near a fire place and listening to the crackling sounds as it gets dark out. Apparently this is a large part of Danish culture, the best way of putting it that I heard was from this one guy Meik Wiking who said that “Hygge” is to Denmark what “Freedom” is to the US. Now I don’t know how true this is, after all this guy is trying to sell this hygge idea it might be entirely manufactured but it certainly illustrates the concept quite well. The word exists in other Scandinavian/ north Germanic languages or something very similar but it doesn’t have quite the same weight to it. So in Norway it’s just their way of saying cozy or homely, at least that’s what I’ve gathered, whereas in Denmark it’s this central idea. You could say there’s the lower case and the upper case hygge. Similarly you have “comfy” as it’s used by normal people every day and you have “Comfy” the romantic ideal.
Now the two aren’t synonyms, I’d actually say that /comfy/ is far larger in scope. See /comfy/ is a bit different for everyone. The different things people put in those threads reflect their own sense of it. Sure there’s a lot of overlap, in fact a lot of things that would be pretty hygge would also be /comfy/ for many anons. You see a lot of the same images reposted often, but there’s quite a lot of different kinds of things. Deckard’s apartment from Blade Runner, a group of anime girls living in a caravan, a photo of a cup of coffee near a window. Ambient music, or folk, or something that just has nostalgia value and most wouldn’t find /comfy/ at all. Some anons like an old timey aesthetic and others prefer a futuristic place to imagine themselves in, hobbit homes and personal space ships. Even though there’s quite a lot of variety, and almost everyone is going to find things in those threads that they don’t get or understand why someone considers them /comfy/, there’s an understanding that the feeling experienced is the same in substance. I’m not really too happy with my explanation, but the explanation isn’t the purpose of this entry it’s just some preliminary information. Hopefully you already know what it is I’m talking about. No, what I’m here to talk about is the only real through line I can identify that connects everything that /r9k/ might consider /comfy/. Yes, the term is used site wide and in fact even outside of 4chan nowadays as it’s kind of spread out like everything does, but it did originate there. I know the /adjective/ meme is a more general thing too, but I’m not here to talk about 4chan shit. Honestly the “culture” for lack of a better term there isn’t something you can give a quick rundown on you have to just live in it, that why the whole lurk more thing came about. I mean I first started visiting maybe late 2011 and I still would be considered a newfag. Of course even that whole new/ old thing is only half serious, it’s literally just a website where people post pictures and make the same stupid jokes over and over. I don’t want to get side tracked here, these recurring /comfy/ threads are what I’m talking about and the idea may have spread and become diluted or changed but it doesn’t matter because I’m not talking about those cases.
One huge thing though is the amount of artwork or oc that taps into the greater board mythology, I’m using the term loosely but it’s definitely something that exists. I mean you have these figures, and yes the more famous ones are not board exclusive or even site exclusive, but they are most developed on /r9k/. The thing is, pol9k is a real thing and that demographic (not the best term, but the best I can think of right now) absolutely dominates the site now. The radicalised virgin, the 2010s upgraded version of the 00s neckbeard caricature. Very few if any individuals embody all of the traits associated with such a character but as a collective all of them show up frequently. So of course a lot of what develops kind of organically on /r9k/ is spread out quickly because /pol/ is so huge now and there’s that overlap thanks to this demographic and gets picked up by normals. Maybe the most famous example is the virgin walk image which existed as a standalone joke that was posted for years. One day someone made some absurd response image to it, the chad stride, and now a couple years later you have some facebook boomers making “Virgin thing I don’t like, Chad thing I do like” memes who have only ever heard of the hacker known as 4chan through fox news segments. Anyway that’s just another tangent, my point is that I’m well aware that most of these characters (pepe, wojak, spurdo and the various variants that have become their own characters after a while) both existed before the current “culture” on the board had developed into what it is today or even before the board existed at all and exist beyond it. You don’t get stuff like pic related anywhere else though, do you?
Yes I know it’s an edit, the original was from the poopoopeepee days though and that whole situation was an earlier part of this board mythology I’m talking about anyway. In fact that whole thing was a response to the characters becoming adopted by so many normies, which further goes to show how these little cartoony beings are inextricably tied up with the place. It’s such a lovely little comic strip as well isn’t it, really warms the heart. You see, these various characters seem to me to form a pantheon, and much like the gods of ancient Hellas these characters show up all over the artwork of various creative robots. You couldn’t really create a serious canon from all of these drawings and things, with a continuous story or something like that, it’d be impossible. These characters just are, they exist in all these separate stories and none of them at the same time, just like the hundreds of poems and plays and works of classical art featuring the Olympians. This is ongoing and like I said earlier organic, I deliberately chose a more recent and kind of shoddy image for the main picture of the post to help show this. There’s stuff like it being made often and by all sorts of people. Well, all sorts of robot anyway. These characters have certain traits we all kind associate with each of them, and we know when one is being used over another what they’re trying to represent. These characters personify various aspects of ourselves, and can be used to create a feeling of sadness or melancholy, of joy, of anger, and most importantly of being /comfy/. The funny thing about the things that feature these characters though is this sense of friendship or being at ease around one another these characters all seem to have when two or more are put together. Even in the ones where they’re messing with one another, and sometimes those can get really fucking weird, there’s this sense that they’re still part of this great and unbreakable friendship or even familial bond. Which again I can’t help but see in parallel to not just the Greek pantheon but Norse mythology as well. See a lot of people think there was this codified story of the gods in these societies, and all the famous folk stories featuring them were believed to be true. Of course that’s a very materialist and modern way of seeing things, and it misses the whole point of these ancient mythologies and the characters they feature. No, there’s stories where they fight and die and betray one another and come together to deal with greater threats and there’s so much no one could possibly believe it all happened and in some kind of order. Some stories might even outright contradict others, but yes if you want to see how the gods of antiquity were used in stories and sagas you should think about how gondola or wojak or that retarded version of pepe are used.
It’s funny to me because this sense of there being a friendship or bond is almost exclusive to the art featuring these characters, in the /comfy/ threads I mean. Almost everything else posted, photos or artwork or music etc. feels very solitary in theme. Maybe this isn’t surprising at all, this is /r9k/ after all it’s filled with isolated and lonely young men, but remember these threads are meant to be about what we find comfort in. So it is interesting that it is often (admittedly very pretty) art of empty bedrooms, or isolated winter cabins, or small ships floating through space. Fuzzy lo-fi music, usually pretty melancholy, that brings to mind the idea of a summer stuck indoors. All tied together with the things that people in the thread talk about, how they’re getting /comfy/ themselves. Naturally because it’s a bunch of NEETs and hikkis or sometimes wageslaves who are still very shut in the rest of the time like myself finding this comfort in old video games and films, simple things enjoyed from home like a hot drink and most importantly these threads themselves. Both alone, and in good company. In the wizards tower with a nice heavy blanket, with the Palantir at hand. See, I first started thinking about this when I made that post a couple of weeks ago. Why I like to romanticise my situation, cut off from people and it’s not merely cope or an attempt to make it more bearable. It’s because, I actually in some sense quite like it. I mean I long for good company sometimes to be sure, but I also take solace in being away from people when things become too stressful. I think I mentioned this before here but I actually used to have a very romantic view of the hikikomori archetype when I was a lot younger and still not necessarily on the path to aligning with it so closely as I do today. It’s because I (and I think it’s fair to say you can extrapolate to a lot of other robots too) have always been drawn to similar figures. The wandering ronin, the chivalric knight-errant, the wizard cooped up in his tower on the mountain, the drifter afloat in space and of course as I’ve mentioned before the ascetic monk. It’s these kinds of characters, sometimes drawn as variations of the /r9k/ pantheon I was talking about earlier and sometimes just reposted pics found anywhere online, that are the second major kind of figure that appears in these threads. Often as well, there’ll just be empty rooms, or city streets with no people (or blurry silhouettes) and similar stuff too. I know it’s a stretch to say that the modern hikikomori (as an archetype, just like I said earlier about something else it’s rare you’ll find any person in the real world who embodies all associated traits) is the incarnation of what all those other figures are for the modern world, it’s just a loser who can’t get laid you may say. Maybe you’re right, but I see a connection there.
So I said that the only time you have depictions of a more social existence in these threads is when the frogs and cancer patients etc. are used but that’s not entirely true. There are also occasionally pictures of children, there’s two images which I can think of right now. One is this drawing of a bunch of Japanese schoolkids doing some kind of project near a big window during what looks like a summer break, the other is of three or maybe four boys playing on an N64 in their pyjamas. I think it’s clear why this is, it’s a case of looking back on childhood with rose tinted glasses. I’m absolutely guilty of this, I’ve made several posts on here in which I’ve done it. When I think of friendship, I think of being a child. Why wouldn’t I, it was when I was a child that I actually had friends. Well, up until my mid teens anyway. Of course I still have friends now, a few anyway although I had many more when I was little, but we see each other at best a few times a year. Clustered around the summer as well, so most of the year I don’t see anyone. The only real group of people with whom I can engage in friendly activities with, laughing about stupid jokes, arguing about anything from politics to art, sharing feels both positive and negative, is /r9k/. Who, that’s right, are best represented by this pantheon I guess I’m calling it now. Again, I think I’ve spent enough time with the robots to say that a lot of them are very similar to me in some fundamental ways, and therefore it’s fair for me to extrapolate my way of seeing things onto them I think. So I think that this is why it’s those characters or children who are necessary stand ins in order for most robots to see any kind of social gathering as /comfy/. A lot of normalfags might see a pub or bar with “interesting” strangers to talk to as comfy, but to any robot such a place would be the exact opposite. Because these threads represent /r9k/, and not only that but they get at the fundamental robot truth more than any other. The only other recurring thread I can think off that comes close would be those Frog and Feels threads but they seem to have stopped or at least become way less common over the last couple years. You can’t help but see these /comfy/ threads as basically the church, or temple, of the board when you think this way. The place where the soul resides.
Ramblings of a neurotic mess 