Soccer takes over the news feed
On June 14, 2018, the World Cup kicked off at Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium. In the first match Russia beat Saudi Arabia 5-0. For Russian fans the big win by the tournament hosts became a vivid reason for discussion. Sports news, congratulations, and jokes about the national team appeared well beyond pages devoted to football. Against this background, the comic about a person who opened an ordinary news feed became especially understandable.
By June 16 the drawing had entered a Russian-language collection of memes about the start of the tournament and Russia's first win. This confirms its use in the context of the 2018 World Cup but does not establish the day of its original creation. Who drew the comic and where its first publication took place has not been reliably established. The comic has its own story about the flow of information: the collection's general title is not a line spoken by its hero.
Four steps from curiosity to overload
In the first panel the hare sits in front of a monitor at a wooden desk and is about to look at the news. In the second he turns to the viewer and asks: “What's new today?” The red chair, desk, and computer keep a calm domestic setting. There is no stadium or television broadcast in the frame. The start refers to an everyday action — checking what is going on — rather than an intention to watch a soccer match specifically.
In the third panel, balls fly out of the monitor, and the hero recoils from the unexpected flood. In the last one the balls already fill the space and almost hide the hare. The metaphor becomes physical: a multitude of messages on one topic turns into objects that can clutter a room. The transition from a quiet question to movement, and then to a motionless heap, gives a short complete story. The answer to the question turned out to be too voluminous for the one who asked.
You can laugh without disliking soccer
The balls signify not the number of goals scored but the repetition of the soccer theme in the feed. There are many of them, they are equally recognizable, and they come from one source — the screen. That is why the comic suits a fan tired of repetition as well as a person who wanted to read other news. The irritation is aimed at the density of the stream, not necessarily at the sport itself. For the joke, what matters is the impossibility of finding a pause between similar posts.
The drawing has an advantage over a plain caption like “soccer everywhere”: it shows the increase in load over time. At first the hero approaches the computer himself, then the screen answers excessively literally, and finally it engulfs the whole room. The result is a comic loss of control over one's own curiosity. The person wanted a small portion of information and got an endless output. The seriousness of the championship here gives way to the everyday feeling of a person who just wants at least one message on a different topic.
Invented feeds with the same avalanche
In the first invented example the hare is a member of a class chat on the day of the school tournament. He asks where the first lesson is tomorrow, and instead of an answer receives twenty photos of the winning team. The second invented scenario concerns an acquaintance who is a fan: the person opens messages to get a dinner invitation, but every correspondent sends their own breakdown of the same goal. The soccer balls remain an exact metaphor for both streams.
In a third invented variant the objects change: instead of balls, boxes of a new phone fly out of the monitor on the day of its launch. Such a transfer keeps the comic's structure: a neutral question, a thematic avalanche, a heap. However, the soccer version is especially tied to the summer of 2018, when the big home tournament made sport a common topic of conversation. The hero does not argue with the national team's victory; he discovers that its discussion has reached even his quiet spot at the computer.
