Colored illustration of a blonde woman hugging a man from behind while he says 'no way fag'

No Way Fag

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Published September 9, 2026

No Way Fag is a single-panel exploitable created by artist Plague of Gripes in November 2014, pairing Resident Evil 4's Leon Kennedy and Ashley Graham in a blunt rejection gag. The image sat quietly on Tumblr for two years before /v/ and /vg/ turned it into one of the defining 4chan image formats of late 2016.

exploitable templates dismissal memes 4chan memes gaming fan art memes

Overview

The format is a two-character single panel: one figure makes a heavy-handed sexual pass, and the other flatly shuts it down with the title line. Plague of Gripes drew the first one with Leon Kennedy brushing off Ashley Graham, and that stiff-arm energy from a stoic male video game lead became the template everyone else copied1.

Anons on /v/ ran the joke through every fandom they could think of, swapping Leon for whichever male protagonist was known for being all business. By December 2016, edits were being built in the Increasingly Verbose Memes style, stretching the rejection line into layered paragraphs of thesaurus-mode refusal3. Plague of Gripes eventually acknowledged the wave by posting a colored redraw of the original and a follow-up featuring Link and Midna from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Tumblr (original post) / 4chan (viral spread)
Creator
Plague of Gripes
Date
2014

The image was uploaded to Plague of Gripes' Tumblr on November 6th, 2014, captioned in-character as Leon Kennedy: "A rolled up wet washrag with Ada's photo stapled to it is all I need to serve America, Ashley"1. The joke riffs on the ending of Resident Evil 4, where Ashley invites Leon back to her place for "overtime" after the jetski escape, and Leon declines.

Plague of Gripes is the same artist known for animation work on the Super Best Friends Play YouTube channel, and the drawing style, thick lines, exaggerated expressions, is a giveaway for anyone familiar with his output2.

How It Spread

The original Tumblr post crawled for years, picking up only around 2,000 notes over the following two and a half years3. A repost to the /r/TwoBestFriendsPlay subreddit on October 7th, 2015 pulled 315 points and not much else3.

Things shifted in the second half of 2016 when 4chan's /vg/ board started running variations, and by December 2016 /v/ was churning out Increasingly Verbose edits where the rejection line got rewritten as escalating walls of vocabulary3. That surge is what dragged Plague of Gripes back to the piece, prompting him to post a cleaned-up colored version and a new Zelda: Twilight Princess entry as a kind of nod to the fanbase doing the recoloring work for him3.

The phrasing later drifted outside the image format entirely, showing up as a standalone catchphrase for any curt rejection online, though Urban Dictionary entries under related slang terms tend to conflate it with other high-school-era acronyms4.

Frequently Asked Questions