Polandball, or Countryballs, is a crude art format which often appears in communities pertaining to history or politics. This format originated from Krautchan around September 2009, where it began as mostly non-political jabs at a certain tripcode user from Poland who posted with them.

Back then, there was a huge, interactive, circular canvas at 'drawball.net', and the users at the Polish sports forum 'kibice.net' got the idea to impose the flag of Poland over it around August 12, 2009,¹⁾²⁾³⁾ which succeeded by August 15, 2009. Shortly after, 4chan attempts to impose a Nazi Swastika over it, but fail, so they simply resorted to DDoS attacks on Polish social media (e.g. Nasza Klasa, Wykop).⁴⁾⁵⁾

The events would allegedly inspire the British user, “Falco”, to start drawing crude comics about Krautchan's “International” (/int/) board, poking fun at the Polish user, “Wojak”, who came from Eris-chan. This is why Polandball used an upside-down flag,⁶⁾ spoke with poor English (e.g. 'cannot into space', 'that feel when'), and it's why the punchlines used to involve a crying Polandball at the end.

Eventually, the format has since deviated to poke fun at international relations and geopolitical conflicts as it spread to 4chan by Novmeber 15, 2009. This allowed the format to spread, but simultaneously became its downfall because political tryhards and self-proclaimed history buffs would latch onto it, then there would be a massive surge in bodied Countryballs, now dubbed 'Countryhumans', sometime around 2018.

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 their Chinese anti-establishment faction had an odd interest with /r/polandball.⁷⁾

• 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]