Meme History: Deal With It

The phrase “Deal With It” showed up as a meme at least as early as 2005. Its first iteration was published on Myspace by artist Matt Furie.

You may know him from a previous cartoon you’re probably more familiar with—“Feels Good Man”—which starred Pepe the Frog and was popular mostly because it was so weird. In this comic, “Deal With It,” is the punchline, used for one character to assert a bizarre and unprovoked dominance over another character, who was literally just sitting there peacefully.

In 2008, we got one of the next known uses of the phrase for the same intent. 

In this case, it’s an image macro of Pac-Man captioned “IM ATHEIST deal with it….” Shortly after that, pixel art of Smugdog wearing equally pixelated sunglasses began circulating. This is where we get the first instance of the now-iconic glasses component for which all of this is most famous.

With the glasses, this becomes a meme that can say the same thing with or without text. It’s the idea that “I’m here, this is my opinion or who I am, and I’m taking up a lot of space in the conversation, even though nobody asked.”

The spread of the ‘Deal With It’ meme

In the following year, it was more a theme than a cohesive meme, but by June of 2010, GIFs featuring the sunglasses were posted to dump.fm by the site’s curator Ryder Ripps. Ryder included his original Photoshop file along with the post, and from there, people were able to run with it.

If he was trying to get it to take off as a meme, this was a good idea, because from there, the Deal With It phrase and the sunglasses spread to Tumblr, then to everywhere else—with this snowball effect happening mainly in the spring and summer of 2013.

The snowball effect took the shape of a number of unrelated events, including the following:

In 2011, #DealWithIt trended on Twitter, aided by Ohio State students displaying over a thousand towels embroidered with the phrase at a basketball game.

In April 2013, Microsoft creative director Adam Orth applied #dealwithit to a tweet that got him in trouble with fans when the Xbox team decided that a console needed to always be connected to the internet.

This was and still is a contentious decision when you consider the fact that it came out of nowhere for a lot of fans, and until then video games were something that all you ever needed to play was a physical cartridge or disk.  If part of the deal with this meme is that it evokes an unprovoked shot fired, this is a good example because people were really upset.

Case in point, video game vlogger Francis posted a video in which he took an axe to his Xbox in protest of the decision and condescension.

In 2013, Gamespot leveraged it to promote their summer sale in a video in which the host of the video wore the sunglasses, and that summer Apple TV launched a new show called Deal With It, which ultimately ran for 3 seasons and through the end of the following year.

And finally, in March 2021, alongside a slew of other memes-turning NFTs, the rights to the sunglasses illustration as well an NFT of the Photoshop template itself were sold by Ryder Ripps on Foundation.app for 15 ETH—at the time, roughly $23,000. 

It's worth noting here that Ryder Ripps offered up the full rights to the sunglasses image, which is unusual in this space, and interesting because the sunglasses were a thing prior to him creating his template—he wasn’t the first one to create a drawing that looked like that.

It’s doubtful that there will ever be any ramifications of any of that for him, but when asked for his thoughts, he sort of gave the whole thing a shrug.

I guess we can all just deal with it.

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