CURRENT MISSION: Conclude the 2026 soyjak.party hack page, aswell as any pages relating to it, such as the Summer 2026 Crisis page.
Update Quotecord with any relevant info. See the blackboard for more info.
User:Joyjakwiki
Do not trust any tweet you see. Preserve every Joyjak before it is buried.
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JOYJAKS ARE GEMS
About me[edit | edit source]
Hello. I am a humble appreciator, archivist, defender, celebrant, curator, apologist, theorist, occasional practitioner, & lifelong enjoyer of Joyjaks.
I like them.
This is not a confession. This is not an ironic statement. This is not some transparent attempt to bait the reader into saying “coal” or “NAS” or “go back to Xitter”. I am simply one of the few brave enough to admit that, when I see a Joyjak, my immediate reaction is not disgust, not confusion, not moral panic, not the usual compulsory Sharty grimace, but a quiet & profound recognition that I am witnessing one of the most strangely sincere developments in the entire post-Soyak visual tradition.
A Joyjak, to me, is not merely a bad soyjak. It is not merely a smoothened wojak. It is not merely a social-media-safe tracejak with the rough edges sanded off. It is a paradox: a soyjak without hatred, a wojak without total despair, an incomprehensible woahjack without the need to explain itself, a creature that seems to have wandered out of the usual mineral-rating battlefield carrying nothing but an awkward grin & a completely misplaced sense of hope.
People ask me why I love Joyjaks. I ask them why they do not.
>Billions must joy.
My position on Joyjaks[edit | edit source]
My position is simple: Joyjaks are gems.
Not all of them are technically IAS. Not all of them have the sacred traits. Not all of them possess the baldness, stubble, glasses, gaping Soylent Grin, or other classical signs that define the original soyjak lineage. Some are probably NAS. Some are probably worse than NAS by any strict mineralogical standard. Some are tracejaks. Some are barely even jaks at all. Some are just wojaks that escaped containment from Xitter with a pastel background & a caption about whimsy. I understand all of this.
I simply do not care.
Joyjaks occupy a sacred liminal space between sincere artistic failure & accidental cultural brilliance. The standard soyjak is made to accuse, mock, flatten, exaggerate, humiliate, or quote an opponent’s words back at them until their own voice becomes ridiculous. The Joyjak, by contrast, feels as though someone discovered the tools of soyjakking, misunderstood the assignment, removed the malice, preserved the expression, added emotional cushioning, & somehow created something even more uncanny.
That is why I love them.
>The average soyjak says: “This is you.”
>The average Joyjak says: “This could be us, perhaps, if everyone were a little worse at drawing & a little better at being happy.”
The beauty of misunderstanding[edit | edit source]
The official anti-Joyjak position often begins from the accusation that Joyjaks were born from outsiders failing to understand Sharty culture. This is not an insult to me. This is the entire point.
Most great traditions become interesting when they are misunderstood.
The earliest soyjaks were already distortions of Wojak. Then soyjaks became variants. Then variants became families. Then families became trends. Then trends became portals, templates, accusations, rituals, raids, categories, & private languages. By the time an outsider finds the thing, the object has already been layered under so much irony, etiquette, hatred, style policing, lore, & mineral classification that there is virtually no way to “understand” it correctly. So the outsider does what outsiders always do: they imitate the silhouette, miss the structure, & accidentally make a new organism.
That organism is the Joyjak.
A Joyjak is what happens when a person sees a soyjak & thinks, “This is expressive,” rather than “This is a weapon.” A Joyjak is what happens when the mouth remains open but the cruelty leaks out. A Joyjak is what happens when the face is still stupid, still exaggerated, still recognisably descended from the wojak-soyjak continuum, but the intent has been replaced with something that resembles enthusiasm, confusion, validation, or completely unjustified optimism.
That misreading is not a defect. It is the source of the charm.
Joyjak versus Soyjak[edit | edit source]
The Soyak is the ancestor. The Soylent Grin is the old fire. The bald head, glasses, scraggly beard, open mouth, & accusatory quote remain the foundation of the entire soyjak tradition. The soyjak says whatever the poster wants the target to have said. It is aggressive ventriloquism. It is a mask placed on someone else’s face.
The Joyjak borrows this machinery & then fails to use it properly.
Instead of making the subject look contemptible, the Joyjak often makes the subject look strangely delighted. Instead of intensifying the insult, it softens it into something that can almost be read as affection. Instead of “look at this enemy”, it often becomes “look at this strange little being experiencing a thought”. It has the body of a mockery image but the soul of a badly moderated positivity thread.
This is why the Joyjak disturbs people. Not because it is too hateful, but because it is not hateful enough. The old weapon has become decorative. The blade has been replaced with a spoon. The spoon is badly drawn. The spoon is smiling. The spoon has probably been posted on Xitter by somebody who thinks “incomprehensible wojack” is a genre rather than a symptom.
>I love that spoon.
Joyjak versus Joysak[edit | edit source]
I also maintain a strong respect for Joysaks, although they must not be confused with Joyjaks.
A Joysak is a different thing: a soyjak trend where the eyes & mouth are switched, producing a face whose most expressive remaining feature may be the eyebrows. Joysaks are unsettling, limited, & quite rare compared to major variants, but they have their own strange appeal. They are more surgical than Joyjaks. They take an existing soyjak & rearrange the facial grammar until the viewer no longer knows whether the creature can feel joy at all.
Joyjaks are different. Joyjaks are not defined by swapping facial parts. Joyjaks are defined by a conceptual failure: the attempt to perform soyjakking without fully retaining the hostility, cultural context, or stylistic discipline that usually gives soyjakking its force.
>The Joysak asks: “What if the mouth & eyes changed places?”
>The Joyjak asks: “What if a soyjak tried to be nice & nobody forgave it?”
Both questions are important. Only one question has become my life’s work.
The correct question is always the Joyjak question.
[edit | edit source]
Woke Bench[edit | edit source]
Woke Bench is one of the great Joyjak-adjacent artefacts because it demonstrates the full problem of sincerity. It is based on the familiar structure of Two Soyjaks Pointing, but filtered through a completely different social & aesthetic context. Its detractors focus on its alleged failure as a proper jak, its traced quality, its softened features, & its association with the wrong audience.
I focus on something else: its innocence.
Woke Bench does not feel like it was made by someone trying to participate in an ancient rite of soyduelling. It feels like it was made by someone who saw the language of soyjaks from outside the blast radius & thought, “This format could be used for something wholesome.” That sentence alone is enough to make most 'teens physically recoil, but I cannot help admiring it. It is an object so spiritually incompatible with its parent culture that it becomes fascinating by existing at all.
It is not powerful because it is technically good. It is powerful because it survives every reason it should not exist.
A gem does not need permission to shine.
When the fajitas come out sizzlin[edit | edit source]
This one is important because it demonstrates the way Joyjaks can migrate. A trace based on a Jacksfilms image, originating from the broader soyjak environment & later noticed or appropriated by outsiders, shows that the Joyjak phenomenon is not simply a single clean invention. It is more like a contamination event moving in both directions: from Sharty culture outward, from Xitter culture inward, & from ordinary reaction-image behaviour into the mineral-rating machine.
The expression is central. The face is not merely open-mouthed; it is situationally ecstatic. It shows how close joy & soy have always been. A soyjak was never just hatred. It was also excitement, consumption, fandom, excess, spectacle, & the embarrassing human need to open one’s mouth when pleased by something stupid. Joyjaks simply take that hidden joy & refuse to hide it behind enough contempt.
That is why they are dangerous.
Derpson[edit | edit source]
Derpson is one of the most important Joyjak forms because it feels genuinely unstable. It is not just a derivative face. It is a record of translation failure. Somewhere between the source image, the trace, the reposting, the brief spam, & the creation of subvariants, the image becomes detached from ordinary authorship. It no longer matters whether the original was good, bad, serious, ironic, hostile, affectionate, or bait. What matters is that the face entered circulation & became recognisable as a Joyjak-type object.
Derpson is what happens when an image looks too awkward to be a proper soyjak but too committed to be dismissed as nothing. It is a limping little creature. I support it. It is truly the greatest 'jak ever.
59 Percent[edit | edit source]
59 Percent is perhaps the most controversial of the major Joyjak-associated examples because it shows how easily bait, appropriation, identity-coded imagery, & variant culture collapse into one another. For many people, that makes it objectionable or spiritually coal. For me, it makes it historically useful.
A Joyjak is rarely pure. It is usually a contested object. People argue whether it is a jak, whether it is bait, whether it was made by outsiders, whether it was adopted sincerely, whether it is part of Xitter culture, whether it is a dead meme, whether it is a raid target, whether it should be forcibly buried, whether it counts as a variant, & whether its very existence represents the collapse of taste.
That argument is the Joyjak.
The image is not separate from the fight around it. The discourse is part of the face.
The Joyjak principle[edit | edit source]
THE JOYJAK PRINCIPLE
I believe the Joyjak principle can be stated as follows:
| > | Any image descended from the soyjak/wojak visual family that attempts, intentionally or accidentally, to preserve the expressive intensity of soyjakking while removing or softening the hostile social function becomes a Joyjak, provided it is received as such by at least one horrified observer. | < |
| The Joyjak Manifesto | ||
This definition is intentionally broad because Joyjaks are not a clean species. They are a mood, a misinterpretation, a failure state, & a splinter-culture fossil. A Joyjak can be an incomprehensible wojack. A Joyjak can be a tracejak. A Joyjak can be an attempted wholesome soyjak. A Joyjak can be a failed imitation. A Joyjak can be bait. A Joyjak can be a dead meme. A Joyjak can be a living accusation against everyone who insists that a meme must remain hostile to remain authentic.
The Joyjak principle also explains why the reaction to Joyjaks has been so intense. A community can usually tolerate a bad variant. It can classify it, insult it, archive it, spam it, or ignore it. But a Joyjak is not merely bad. A Joyjak implies that the entire semiotic engine of soyjakking can be repurposed by people who do not respect its original violence, humour, boundaries, or etiquette. That is more threatening than coal. Coal still belongs to the mine. Joyjaks are flowers growing through the mine shaft.
I love the flowers.
joyjak.party[edit | edit source]
The existence of joyjak.party, also called the jorty, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that Joyjaks deserve serious treatment. A dedicated imageboard for the creation, posting, & sharing of Joyjaks is not a trivial development, even if its statistics are small, its boards are sparse, or its cultural authority is questionable. The very fact that the Jorty exists proves that Joyjaks moved from isolated misunderstanding into institutional form.
An imageboard dedicated to Joyjaks is inherently funny, but it is not only funny. It is also historically inevitable. Every splinter wants a home. Every disliked variant wants a gallery. Every cursed drawing style wants a board where somebody can post “gem” under it without immediately being told to delete their account. The Jorty is that refuge.
The /joy/ board’s subtitle, “joyjaks yes somebody who looks like that probably says that”, is almost perfect. It preserves the original soyjak formula while gently turning it sideways. The old accusation remains, but the result is lighter. Somebody who looks like that probably does say that, yes, but maybe that is fine. Maybe they are having a nice day. Maybe they saw something on their feed that made them smile. Maybe they are about to post the worst tracejak in history & call it healing.
I support them.
Total Joyjak Death[edit | edit source]
I must address the anti-Joyjak campaign.
The existence of efforts to prevent Joyjaks from being forced only confirms their cultural relevance. Nobody organises against a meme that has no power. Nobody declares death against a thing that is already dead in the ordinary sense. “Total Joyjak Death” is therefore not proof that Joyjaks failed. It is proof that Joyjaks succeeded in becoming intolerable.
This is the highest achievement available to a meme.
Joyjaks became annoying enough to be named, documented, hated, categorised, & opposed. They entered Happenings. They acquired enemies. They became linked to a raid. They generated arguments about origins, outsiders, Xitter, variant legitimacy, & meme death. That is not the biography of nothing. That is the biography of a cultural object.
If Joyjaks were merely bad images, no one would care. If Joyjaks were merely outsider slop, no one would archive them. If Joyjaks were merely dead, no one would keep saying they must die.
[they clearly are not ready for joy]
On accusations of dead-meme status[edit | edit source]
Many have said Joyjaks are dead memes. I accept this, but only under the correct interpretation.
Joyjaks are dead in the same way Wojak is dead, Soyak is dead, rage comics are dead, imageboards are dead, Twitter is dead, the internet is dead, & every cultural object becomes dead the moment somebody notices it too clearly. Deadness is not the end of a meme. Deadness is when a meme becomes conscious of itself & begins producing second-order discourse, ironic revivals, preservation efforts, splinter boards, deletion campaigns, & wiki pages written by people with suspiciously strong opinions.
In that sense, Joyjaks were born dead. That is part of their charm.
A living meme wants to spread. A dead meme wants to be interpreted. Joyjaks do both badly. That is why they are perfect.
Why I personally love them[edit | edit source]
Why I love them
I love Joyjaks because they are embarrassing.
I love Joyjaks because they are sincere in a culture allergic to sincerity.
I love Joyjaks because they make the wrong people angry for reasons that are both understandable & completely disproportionate.
I love Joyjaks because they are often drawn badly, traced lazily, understood poorly, posted in the wrong places, defended by the wrong users, hated by the right users, & preserved by accident.
I love Joyjaks because they prove that no visual language can remain ideologically pure once outsiders discover the Save Image button.
I love Joyjaks because they are what happens when someone looks at years of weaponised soyjak culture & says, with catastrophic innocence, “What if this was about joy?”
I love Joyjaks because they are not quite soyjaks, not quite wojaks, not quite incomprehensible wojacks, not quite bait, not quite safe-edgy, not quite wholesome, not quite coal, not quite gem, & not quite alive.
I love Joyjaks because the name itself is stupidly elegant. Soy becomes joy. Mockery becomes enthusiasm. The open mouth remains open, but now it is laughing at the wrong joke.
My Joyjak typology[edit | edit source]
After extensive observation, I divide Joyjaks into several categories.
The Sincere Joyjak[edit | edit source]
This is the purest form. It is created by someone who genuinely thinks the soyjak visual language is fun, expressive, or relatable, but who does not understand or does not care about the hostile function. These are usually the most hated Joyjaks because they are innocent enough to appear offensive to the tradition itself.
The Outsider Tracejoy[edit | edit source]
This type begins as a trace of an existing photograph, meme, selfie, or social-media post. It often lacks the recognised IAS features & may look too smooth, too soft, too cute, too flattering, or too anatomically forgiving. It is spiritually Joyjak because it imitates the shell while missing the curse.
The Incomprehensible Joyjak[edit | edit source]
This overlaps with incomprehensible woahjacks. It is an image whose meaning is obscure to outsiders, insiders, or both. The incomprehensibility may arise from too much context, too little context, poor drawing, excessive stylisation, or pure social-media mutation. These are valuable because they demonstrate that Joyjaks are not merely wholesome. They can also be deranged.
The Bait Joyjak[edit | edit source]
This is a Joyjak produced to provoke, infiltrate, annoy, appropriate, or force a reaction. It may not be sincere at all. However, once a bait Joyjak is adopted sincerely by even one user, it becomes culturally real. This is one of the central laws of the internet: ironic objects become sincere the moment the least self-aware person in the room enjoys them.
The Posthumous Joyjak[edit | edit source]
This is any Joyjak posted after the meme has already been declared dead. These are my favourites. A posthumous Joyjak is a little ghost wearing a smile. It knows it has no future. It posts anyway.
Advice for new Joyjak enjoyers[edit | edit source]
Do not over-explain your Joyjak appreciation. It will not help.
Do not insist that every Joyjak is IAS. This is tactically weak & probably false.
Do not confuse Joyjaks with Joysaks unless you want every archivist in the room to become annoying.
Do not pretend Joyjaks have no connection to outsider social-media culture. They obviously do, & that is part of their identity.
Do not deny that many Joyjaks are bad. Instead, understand that badness is one of the mediums in which Joyjaks operate.
Do not force Joyjaks too aggressively. A Joyjak must look as if it arrived by accident, even when it did not.
Do not sanitise the whole tradition into something respectable. Joyjaks are not respectable. They are simply less hostile in a way that makes them more suspicious.
Do not apologise for loving them. Apology is for people who still believe taste can be defended rationally.
>But do keep posting them.
My dream for the future[edit | edit source]
My dream is simple. I want a full Joyjak archive. I want every major Joyjak specimen categorised by origin, trace source, date of appearance, reception, mineral rating, outsider involvement, degree of sincerity, & proximity to recognised soyjak features. I want the Jorty preserved. I want Woke Bench, Derpson, 59 Percent, fajita-related forms, incomprehensible Joyjaks, posthumous Joyjaks, failed Joyjaks, bait Joyjaks, & accidental Joyjaks all documented with the absurd seriousness they deserve.
I want future scholars of the Soysphere to understand that Joyjaks were not merely a dead Xitter trend. They were a brief rupture in the emotional economy of soyjakking. They were the moment the hostile mask was worn incorrectly. They were the smile where the accusation should have been.
Most importantly, I want one person, years from now, to open an old page, see a badly drawn Joyjak staring back at them, & understand immediately.
This was never coal.
Final statement[edit | edit source]
Joyjaks are not the death of soyjaks. They are not the replacement of soyjaks. They are not the correction of soyjaks. They are not even necessarily good soyjaks.
They are Joyjaks.
That is enough.
I will continue to love them openly, calmly, & without shame. I will defend their place in the archive. I will distinguish them from Joysaks. I will respect their relationship to incomprehensible woahjacks. I will acknowledge their Xitter contamination. I will accept their dead-meme status. I will post through the backlash. I will smile with them.
Billions must joy.
