Deal With It

Origin

“Deal With It” is an animation, not an image: a pair of chunky pixelated sunglasses descends from the top of the frame and settles onto a subject’s face, over the caption in blocky capitals.

The phrase’s internet life begins around 2005, when the artist Matt Furie — later known for creating Pepe the Frog — used it in a webcomic posted to MySpace. The visual format developed separately on the Something Awful forums, where an animated GIF of a “smug dog” donning sunglasses circulated for some time before anyone treated it as a template.

The moment it became a format was June 2010, on the media-sharing site Dump.fm, which ran a “deal with it” GIF-making contest. Users produced dozens of versions, established the conventions, and pushed the format outward.

What it means / how it’s used

The format signals unapologetic confidence — usually about something petty, and usually with heavy irony.

Its uses:

• Announcing an unpopular opinion and declining to defend it.
• Reacting to being caught doing something mildly indefensible.
• Celebrating a small, cheap victory.
• Applied to animals, objects, and inanimate subjects for absurdity.

The pixel-art sunglasses are essential to the tone. Rendered cleanly, the gesture would read as genuine swagger; rendered as deliberately crude 8-bit blocks, it reads as a joke about swagger — which is the only register in which it has ever been used sincerely.

How it spread

The rollout through 2010 is well documented. A GIF was posted to Tumblr on June 4, 2010; the trend was covered by a blog on June 25, 2010; a dedicated site, DealWithIt.net, launched on July 25, 2010; and photographers began producing real-world variations from August 3, 2010.

Generators followed quickly, letting anyone drop the sunglasses onto any uploaded image, and by 2011 the format was ubiquitous across Tumblr, Reddit and forums.

Its lasting contribution was the sunglasses themselves, which detached entirely from the caption. The pixel shades have since been added to countless images with no “deal with it” text at all — they now function as a standalone symbol meaning roughly the same thing, and are a standard emote and sticker across chat platforms.

Notable examples & variations

• The original smug dog GIF.
• Generator-made versions on user-uploaded photos.
• Real-world recreations with physical pixel-art glasses.
• The sunglasses used alone, without the caption.
• Emote and sticker versions across Discord, Twitch and messaging apps.

Legacy / cultural impact

Deal With It is a foundational GIF-era format, from a period when animation was the internet’s main comic device and Tumblr was its primary distribution network.

Its influence is visible in a specific way: the pixelated sunglasses are one of very few meme elements to become a genuine symbol — a piece of visual shorthand that carries meaning independently, without a template, a caption, or any knowledge of where it came from.