“This Is Fine,” for all its quirky internet-iness, also has a Mona Lisa quality. Green has compared “This Is Fine” to a “good piece of art,” and the comparison is apt: He made the comic intentionally vague so that it could support very different interpretations. Read: The SNL sketch that perfectly mocks our upside-down reality Its three ironized words- this is fine-were a useful stand-in, The Verge’s Chris Plante put it, “for when a situation becomes so terrible our brains refuse to grapple with its severity.” And “This Is Fine” applied to many of the situations people found themselves in as they navigated the world. This was the “that feeling when” era of the social web-a moment when people were mining their daily experiences for insights that might be turned into shareable media. Workers used it to describe the stresses of their job. Students used the meme to describe feeling unprepared for upcoming tests. In the dog surrounded by fire, they saw themselves. When “On Fire” went viral a year later-after users posted the comic’s first two panels to Reddit and the image-sharing site Imgur-many of those who amplified it focused on its potential for self-deprecation: It stood in for the small acts of avoidance and complacency and denial that are familiar features of people’s lives. “And the comic just ended up writing itself after that.” “It kind of feels like you just have to ignore all the insanity around you like a burning house,” he recently told NPR.
#HOUSE BURNING DOWN IM FINE MEME FULL#
(The dog’s full name, appropriately: Question Hound.) Green, in creating “On Fire,” was trying to reassure himself. For him, the comic represented a kind of reassurance in the face of instability: He had begun taking antidepressants, he’s said in interviews, and was worried about whether the medications would be a good fit for him.
#HOUSE BURNING DOWN IM FINE MEME SERIES#
Green created “On Fire”-an entry in his comic series Gunshow-in January 2013. The dog, consumed by the fire, melts away. The final panel brings the obvious conclusion: Things are not going to be okay. “That’s okay, things are going to be okay,” the dog says, his leg now stripped of flesh. As the dog drinks, his left leg catches fire. Here, the panels that have so far maintained a consistent color scheme-yellow, brown, orange-introduce a new color: red. In the second, the dog smiles brightly and says, “This is fine.” In the third, as the flames get closer, the still-grinning hound takes a drink of what looks to be coffee and says, “I’m okay with the events that are unfolding currently.” In the fourth, he takes another swig. The meme comes from KC Green’s six-panel comic “On Fire.” In the first, the dog, wearing a small bowler hat, sits at a table, surrounded by flames. The flame-licked dog, that avatar of learned helplessness, speaks not only to individual people-but also, it turns out, to the country. That elasticity has contributed to its persistence. “This Is Fine,” though, is a work of near-endless interpretability: It says so much, so economically. Memes are typically associated with creative adaptability, the image and text editable into nearly endless iterations. It is now 10 years old, and it is somehow more relevant than ever. But the meme best known as “This Is Fine”-the one with the dog sipping from a mug as a fire rages around him-has lasted. Most explode and recede at nearly the same moment: the same month or week or day.
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