Pepe the Frog: History and Key Facts

Pepe the Frog ( PEP-ay) is a comic character and Internet meme created by cartoonist Matt Furie. Designed as a green anthropomorphic frog with a humanoid body usually wearing a blue t-shirt, Pepe originated in Furie's 2005 webcomic Boy's Club. The character became an Internet meme when his popularity steadily grew across websites such as Myspace, Gaia Online, and 4chan from 2008 onwards; by 2015, he had become one of the most popular memes on 4chan and Tumblr.

Different types of Pepe memes include "Sad Frog", "Smug Frog", "Angry Pepe", "Feels Frog", and "You will never..." Frog; the most popular sentences associated to him are "Feels Good Man" (a quote from his original Boy's Club appearance, which became the character's catchphrase) and its opposite, "Feels Bad Man", meant to respectively express joy and sadness. Since 2014, "Rare Pepes" have been posted on the "meme market" as if they were trading cards.

Although originally an apolitical character in Furie's works and its original internet popularity, Pepe was appropriated from 2015 onward as a symbol of the alt-right white nationalist movement. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) included Pepe in its hate symbol database in 2016, but said most instances of Pepe were not used in a hate-related context. Since then, Furie has expressed his dismay at Pepe being used as a hate symbol and has sued organizations for doing so; the history of Pepe and Furie's attempt to dissociate the character from the alt-right were covered in the 2020 documentary film Feels Good Man. In 2019, Pepe was used by protesters in the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests; conversely to its western political use, Pepe the Frog's symbolism in Hong Kong is not perceived as being connected with alt-right ideology, and was welcomed by Furie.

Source and attribution

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