A 2013
Gunshow strip titled "On Fire" features an
anthropomorphic dog (dubbed "Question Hound") drinking tea in a room that is burning down. Despite its own body catching fire and beginning to melt, the dog remains perfectly calm throughout the six-panel strip, saying lines such as "That's okay, things are going to be okay." The first two panels of the strip, featuring the dog simply sitting in the blazing room saying "this is fine", became a popular
internet meme. The dog's demeanor, described as "somewhere between bemused acceptance and outright denial" by
Slate Magazines Jacob Brogan, proved popular with its full context removed. The sentence "this is fine" was described by
The Verges Chris Plante as a "shorthand for when a situation becomes so terrible our brains refuse to grapple with its severity". The spread of the two panels was traced back by the
Know Your Meme community to September 2014, when the image appeared without attribution on
Reddit and
Imgur with the caption "Basically how I'm handling life right now". The meme has been used on
social media as a general comment on bad events or disasters, such as the
Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It was used by
Hollywood Reporter to criticize the 2026 Golden Globes for pretending all's well with the world. Green described the meme's popularity in 2016 as "a barometer of current trends", indicating that it was an intense year. Brogan stated that the meme is unique because it is infrequently modified from its original version and because its popularity was still climbing as of 2016. In 2016 Green followed up the "On Fire" comic with a "This is Not Fine" comic on
The Nib, in which the dog abruptly switches from denial of the fire to terror over it, putting it out in a panic while yelling at themselves for letting the fire go so far out of control, and makes mention of the recent killing of
Harambe, a gorilla in a Cincinnati zoo. In 2016,
The New York Times called "This is fine" "the meme this year deserves". In 2023,
the Atlantic called it "The Meme That Defined a Decade", and called it "a work of near-endless
interpretability". In June 2023, the "This is Fine" emote cosmetic was added to
Epic Games'
Fortnite: Battle Royale as part of the Chapter 4: Season 3
Battle Pass in collaboration with KC Green. In September 2024, KC Green and Numskull Games announced that they are working on a video game based on "On Fire" titled
This is Fine: Maximum Cope which is planned as a "classic, old-school, platformer game" where Question Hound battles monsters from inside his subconscious. KC Green and Numskull Games also announced that a
Kickstarter campaign to help fund the game's development will start of September 26.
Usage in politics In July 2016, the
United States Republican Party (or GOP, short for "Grand Old Party") used the "This is fine" meme in a
Twitter message, in reference to the
Democratic Party selecting
Hillary Clinton as
their presidential candidate during the
2016 Democratic National Convention. The usage of the meme suggested that Democratic voters were in denial about damage being done by selecting Clinton as candidate, though it may also be that the GOP was simply celebrating what they saw as a "Democratic meltdown". Usage of the meme by the GOP drew backlash from some Democratic voters, webcomic creators, and also from KC Green himself, who said "everyone is in their right to use this is fine [sic] on social media posts, but man o man I personally would like @GOP to delete their stupid post."
Vox Media compared Green's experience with that of various musicians that had their works appropriated for political purposes, and
The New York Observer used the event as an example of how the works of webcomic artists are frequently reposted without proper attribution. The Ukrainian authorities behind the @Ukraine
Twitter account used an animated version of the "This is fine" meme to illustrate in a self-deprecating sardonic tone the fight against the
2017 Ukraine ransomware attacks. This invited comments that they used the meme wrongly, since it came to signify disastrous government inaction; but it attracted attention to the tweet and contributed to an increase in the number of
followers. Their caption reads instead: "Cuz this is not fine!". ==Media==