A FAMILIAR MEME. A NEW CONTEXT.

Me Gusta Guy

What this meme means

Me Gusta Guy is a rage comics character with bulging eyes and a wide, crooked smirk. Its name is Spanish for "I like it," and it expresses satisfaction with unpleasant, strange, or outright disgusting things.

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What is shown

The image shows a round head with large eyes that look in different directions, as if trying to focus on something unpleasant. The mouth is stretched into a lopsided, almost predatory grin, and dark strokes on the cheeks and forehead emphasize the tension in the face. The character looks both pleased and unsettling at the same time, and that combination is the image's main feature.

The drawing is done in the style typical of rage comics: a thick outline, minimal detail, and an expressive face. That style allowed emotion to be conveyed quickly and the image to be copied easily, which matters for memes that live on mass repetition. Even this simple face scheme works as a precise sign: the viewer immediately understands this is about some strange pleasure.

Origin

The character is credited to illustrator Mai Oswald, who drew the face in early 2010 and posted it on 4chan and Reddit on March 18, 2010. At the same time, she posted several examples on her own Tumblr and DeviantArt, and on 4chan she posted comics made from different accounts and different IP addresses to help the meme pick up popularity quickly. According to Oswald herself, that publication was conceived as a deliberate attempt to make the face go viral.

The first follow-up was a four-panel comic about a cat reacting to being petted, also drawn by Oswald. In December 2010, a blog called Me Gusta Face appeared, collecting such comics in one place. Oswald's authorship became publicly known through a Reddit discussion and AMA held on March 8, 2011 — nearly a year after the drawing's first publication.

How the meme spread

By May 2012, the series had a notable presence on Meme Generator and had spread across Tumblr, Memebase, and the subreddit F7U12, where thousands of comics were posted. The image became the basis for a whole family of variants: "No Me Gusta" expresses unpleasant displeasure, while "Me Gusta Mucho" conveys very strong enjoyment. That flexibility let the meme live much longer than most one-day pictures of that era.

The character wasn't tied to any particular event or storyline, so it could be applied to any situation. The meme moved from forum to forum and from blog to blog without noticeably burning out, with each new author adding their own storylines. That made the image one of the key elements of the shared visual language of rage comics, understood by a large audience without explanation.

Typical use and how the joke works

Originally, the meme was used to express strange enjoyment of outright perverse or unpleasant situations. Over time its meaning broadened: the face describes a mix of disgust and enjoyment, for example when someone sees something ridiculous or indecent but can't look away. In comments, it's usually placed next to absurd news, a bad joke, or a situation where the viewer is both cringing and laughing.

The humor rests on dissonance. The viewer sees a clearly unsettling expression, but the caption insists that everything is enjoyable. That gap between the face and the words creates the comic effect, while the image itself stays within the bounds of absurdity. That's why the meme is used ironically more often than sincerely, and it works well as a short reaction without extra explanation.