Cheems

Origin

Cheems was a real dog. His name was Balltze — nicknamed Ball Ball — a Shiba Inu who lived in Hong Kong with his owner, Kathy. The photograph that became the meme was posted to Instagram on September 4, 2017.

He is a doge variant, and part of a large family of Shiba Inu characters built by the community around the subreddit r/dogelore, each with an assigned personality.

Cheems’ defining trait is his speech. He inserts extra “m” sounds into words — cheemsburbger for cheeseburger — and the earliest such post appeared on June 8, 2019. The lisping, mumbling delivery characterises him as sweet, slightly pathetic, and not especially capable.

What it means / how it’s used

Cheems represents the weaker, softer, modern version of something. He is almost always paired with Buff Doge, a heavily muscled Shiba, in a two-panel comparison contrasting an earlier era with the present.

The format — Buff Doge vs. Cheems — took hold from mid-May 2020, and its structure is fixed:

• Buff Doge: the past, presented as tougher, more capable, more serious.
• Cheems: the present, presented as softer, coddled, or diminished.

The comparisons are usually jokes about generational decline, and they are almost always affectionate rather than genuinely reactionary — the humour comes from the absurdity of the claim and the fact that it is being made by two dogs.

Cheems also appears alone, as a reaction for weakness, whining, or wanting something badly.

How it spread

The character emerged from r/dogelore in mid-2019 and built steadily through that year as the community elaborated its shared canon.

The Buff Doge comparison format took it worldwide from May 2020, becoming one of the most-used two-panel templates of that year and spreading well beyond communities that knew any of the underlying lore.

Balltze

The dog behind the character had a documented and much-followed life. He was diagnosed with pancreatitis in May 2022, and later with cancer. He died on August 19, 2023, following complications from a procedure to drain fluid from his chest.

His owner announced it on his Instagram account with a message asking people not to be sad, and to remember the joy he had brought. The response was enormous — tribute art, memorial posts, and coverage in international press for a dog most people knew only as a badly spelled cartoon.

Notable examples & variations

• Buff Doge vs. Cheems two-panel comparisons.
• Solo Cheems reactions for weakness or want.
• The “cheemsburbger” speech pattern applied to other words.
• Multi-panel dogelore comics featuring the wider cast.
• Memorial art and tributes from August 2023.

Legacy / cultural impact

Cheems is one of the most successful characters to come out of a collaboratively built meme universe — a shared canon assembled by a subreddit, with consistent characters, voices and rules, none of which any single person authored.

He is also part of a small, strange category: memes whose subject was a real animal with a name, an owner, a medical history and a death that a large number of strangers genuinely mourned.