This is fine

"This is fine" is an internet catchphrase originating from the 2013 webcomic Gunshow by KC Green. In the original strip, a cheerful dog calmly sips coffee while his house burns down around him. The first two panels — dog, fire, and the line "This is fine" - escaped into the wild and quickly became the universal shorthand for either actual acceptance or complete denial in the face of catastrophe.

Meme History

The phrase became instantly useful online because of its flexibility. This is fine can mean:

• Yes, everything is genuinely okay.
• No, nothing is okay, but I’m pretending it is.
• Yes, everything is burning down, and I have accepted my fate as kindling.

Its spread was accelerated by reaction image culture, where screenshots of the comic were dropped into threads as punctuation for any unfolding disaster - personal, political, or global.

Interpretations

Unlike most memes, This is fine doesn’t just have one meaning. It lives in the tension between sincerity and irony:

• Sincere: Used without the comic, simply typed out, it can read as a calm affirmation.
• Ironic: With the dog-in-fire panels, it signals awareness that things are catastrophically wrong but that denial is the coping mechanism of choice.
• Absurdist: In deep meme culture, the dog has been redrawn countless times (in space, underwater, in corporate boardrooms), suggesting that disaster is universal and eternal.

Cultural Relevance

This is fine has been adopted by journalists, politicians, and marketing departments - often to their detriment. What began as an absurdist comic about denial has become the go-to shorthand for commentary on climate change, political upheaval, corporate collapse, and personal burnout.

In Popular Usage

• When an online service goes down for the third time in a week, someone inevitably posts the burning dog.
• Entire presentations at tech conferences have used the panel to describe ongoing issues with their product, which ironically makes the problem seem worse.
• Politicians have used it unironically in campaign materials, which only convinced voters that nothing was fine.

Legacy

KC Green has expressed both bemusement and exhaustion at the life of the dog beyond the strip. The original comic continues well past the famous two panels, eventually showing the dog melting into ash. The internet rarely shares that part - denial is funnier than consequences.

References

[1] KC Green, Gunshow, 2013.

[2] Literally every Twitter thread about a crisis.