Blocked on Weibo: Sina Weibo introduces

<Sina Weibo introduces “Rage Face” emojis, a la 4chan/Reddit rage comics>

Major breaking news everyone: Sina Weibo introduced this month a new series of emojis (you know, those popular smiley face images that are found in many text messaging apps), bringing up the number of unique animated gifs that you can embed into your tweets to over 1,000.

What makes these curious are they fact that they aren’t your typical, cutesy 可爱 emoticons (even a pile of poo is cute when rendered into emoji form). They come from the so-called “rage comics” which originated from the anything-goes imageboard 4chan and were further popularized by the website Reddit, both of which are English-language (and primarily American) websites.

Based on some cursory searching of Weibo posts for the rage comic emojis, they seem to have started appearing around January 17. They aren’t heavily used in posts, with most of these emoji having less than 20 search results (which doesn’t include usage in comments).

Why does this matter? No particular reason (I was joking about this being major news by the way), but it is notable that someone at Sina thought it worth implementing a whole panel worth of emoji that began strictly as an English-language meme—and an often times mean-spirited one at that. Rage comics are rather passe now in America, having peaked in popularity a year or two ago. However, as Shangaiist reported back in December about the existence of Chinese rage comics, they seem to be picking up in popularity in China due in part to the website 暴走漫画 (Baozou Manhua).

Here’s a list of the 71 emoji: the code you type to create them followed by the rough Chinese translation (plus the animated gifs from the site that you can download):