Five stages.
Sixteen years compressed into five pictures. Read them in order or don't — he isn't going anywhere, and he wasn't going anywhere before you got here either.
The last good year
He was everywhere. Four panels, two colours, someone's dad, a Pop-Tart. He was the loudest thing on the internet and he was drawn by a million people who never signed their work and never asked him how he felt about it.
He wasn't the best meme. He was just there, every single time.
Nobody replied
There was no announcement. Nothing was deleted, nothing was banned, nobody sent a message. The forums reformatted, the subreddits went quiet, the image hosts started expiring, and one day the last thread he was in simply stopped receiving replies.
He waited. That is the part nobody drew.
He grew the legs here
For three years he had no body below the neck, because nobody needed to draw one. When the drawing stopped, he had to move himself. The legs came in thin and wrong. The moustache came in later and nobody asked for it.
His eyes went red from a screen that had been switched off since 2012. They have not un-reddened.
Still running
Sixteen years without stopping, without a thread to run back to, without knowing that the thing he is running toward closed a long time ago.
A meme does not die when people stop liking it. It dies when people stop posting it. He has been technically alive and functionally dead for longer than most of the internet has existed.
He found a new chain
Robinhood Chain runs around the clock. No four o'clock, no closing bell, no last call. It is the first place he has been in sixteen years that operates on the same schedule he does.
He does not understand what a bonding curve is. He understands that people are looking at him again.
That's all five.
There is no stage six until something happens worth drawing. When there is, it goes here first.