Polandball, or Countryballs, is a crude art format often associated with historical and political shitposting. The format reportedly emerged from Krautchan in September 2009, where it initially began as non-political jabs towards a Polish regular in the community at the time.

Back on August 12, 2009, the users at “Kibice.net”¹⁾ proposed to impose the flag of Poland on a circular “Drawball.com” canvas,²⁾³⁾ rallying support from Nasza Klasa and Wykop in the process.⁴⁾ The plan succeeded on August 15, 2009. Shortly after, the users of 4chan's “Random” (/b/) board attempt to impose a Nazi Swastika over it, but fail and organize a DDoS attack on Polish social media instead.⁵⁾⁶⁾

In the following month at Krautchan's “International” (/int/) board, these events reportedly inspired “Falco”, a British user, into drawing crude comics to troll “Wojak” (Wojaczek), a Polish user from Eris-chan. This is why Polandball uses an inverted flag,⁷⁾ communicates in poor English (e.g. “cannot into space”, “that feel when”), and you usually saw the ball crying at the end of the comic.

At some point, the format deviated to poke fun at international relations, exploding in popularity as it spread to 4chan by November⁸⁾ and other mainstream websites (e.g. Facebook). The format eventually decayed over time, with political tryhards and self-proclaimed history buffs started exploiting it, then you suddenly had this bodied “Countryhumans” phenomenon that became eerily similar to Hetalia at the time.

The format has a low barrier of entry and tends to oversimplify complex topics, which allows it to become a low-effort propaganda tool as people rarely do their own research and may presume memes are truthful, furthering fears of a post-literate society. Such efforts have been observed on Reddit, where the Chinese anti-establishment faction had an odd interest with /r/polandball.⁹⁾

• The ominous bird with red robes is called the “Omsk bird” (Омская птица) or “Winged Doom”, which references a Russian copypasta from Sosach. Some boards use this as their “Unknown” flag.

• Countryballs on Wikipedia [EN]
• Polandball on ChanWiki [PL]