To Doomer Girl’s fans, who are mostly young women, her appeal is simple enough: If Doomer Girl were real, she’d be a cool girl, dark and sad in a stylish way. Who hasn’t cosplayed as one of those? But Doomer Girl’s past is as twisted as her implied outlook on life. She came out of 4chan, the infamous hotbed of frequently racist and misogynistic internet culture. She was created as the female counterpart to another cartoon character called Doomer, a ragged-looking guy with three-day scruff, a black beanie, and a cigarette perpetually dangling from his mouth. In Doomer comics, the joke is that Doomer Girl should realize she is Doomer’s perfect match, but she rejects him instead because she’s a woman, and women live only to withhold. (A classic!)

Doomer Girl could have waxed and waned and died there, but she was plucked from 4chan and moved to Reddit, then onto Tumblr and Twitter and Instagram in a matter of days. The viral spread was driven largely by women who were removing her from a context in which she was a mechanism of male self-mythologizing and remaking her into something joyful.

In the history of memes, the familiar story is one of harmless images accruing sinister meanings that turn them into weapons—the most famous example being Pepe the Frog, an innocuous web-comic character that was co-opted by various extremist groups leading up to the 2016 election. But Doomer Girl shows how the reverse can happen too: A cruel idea gets whittled down and recirculated without context, because its origin is less interesting than the creative possibilities.

For the past year and a half, crudely drawn internet characters named with the -oomer suffix have been getting odder and more specific. The original was a “30-year-old Boomer,” created on 4chan to make fun of Millennials who espouse ideas associated with Baby Boomers. “Zoomers” are teenagers whose entire personalities were molded by the algorithms of SoundCloud and YouTube. Doomers, meanwhile, are the nihilistic cousins of “Bloomers” and “Gloomers,” all three gradients of the same 20-something. Whereas Bloomers are well adjusted and Gloomers are depressed because they are not, Doomers have simply stopped trying. They are no longer pursuing friendships or relationships, and get no joy from anything because they know that the world is coming to an end. As one of the many iterations of the meme goes, a Doomer “pays for his phone but only use [sic] it to know what time it is.”

The -oomer family extends even further, into dozens of oddly specific and niche types—an entire visual vocabulary for young people who want to make fun of happy idiots and stereotype themselves as particular shades of down-and-out. The Doomer character was first posted in September 2018, on 4chan’s business-and-finance board, and reposted the next day on the /r9k/ board, which is one of the more repugnant places on the internet. To an outsider, the average post will read either as garbled nonsense or almost parodically misogynistic and racist vitriol. The board is probably best known for its frequent calls for a “beta uprising,” in which neglected cerebral men take revenge against women and “alphas”—including a September 2015 post that the FBI investigated for its possible connection to a mass shooting.