The Meme-ing Behind Pepe
Meme’s have become an art form in modern society. With an achieve of almost 15,000 memes just on know your memes and hundreds of social media accounts that are dedicated to memes the popularity of memes just keeps growing. Everyone has their favourite meme though and mine happens is Pepe the Frog. Originating from the Boy’s Club, a comic book series from 2005 by artist Matt Furie. Pepe became an overnight sensation in 2008 after being picked up by 4chan and the caption “feels good man” was added. Since Pepe first became a popular meme there have been many Facebook pages, Tumblr blogs, Instagram accounts and twitter accounts dedicated to him and his renditions.
Overtime Pepe the Frog has been used as an anthropomorphic frog reaction image on 4chan, reddit and other popular forums and sites on the Internet. With many different Pepe versions he can portray a wide set of emotions from anger to melancholy to surprise and even has renditions to portray different TV characters and bits from pop culture. Some of the most popular remakes being Sad Frog, Smug Frog, Well Meme’d, and Rare Pepe. Rare Pepe picked up enough steam that people began using them as trading cards, creating their own variations and selling them on ebay. One post containing 1,200 Rare Pepes that received more than 260,000 views in its first week and raised an astonishing $99,166 before being taken down.
Recently though Pepe has been receiving some hate after being picked up by the Alt-Right Association, being linked with white supremacy groups, and being used as a Pro-Trump meme. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) labeled Pepe as a hate symbol after the Nazi-Pepe rendition and a version with Pepe dressed in a KKK hat and robe, which has led people to refer to Pepe as a popular white nationalist symbol. When artist Furie was asked about this he expressed his disappointment with Pepe being taken up as a racist symbol and for the ADL citation because it was something he never intended to happen. Since then Furie and the publisher of Boy’s Club has made statements refuting Pepe’s association with the alt-right groups or Donald Trump. On Oct. 14, 2016 the ADL and Furie announced that had joined forces on the #SavePepe campaign to take back Pepe from racists and to restore the positivity from the original meme.
