Posted on 02/24/2017 3:19:31 PM PST by 1rudeboy
I’ll cut right to the chase:
Pepe the Frog isn’t a white nationalist symbol.
Pepe the Frog isn’t a harmless meme propagated by teenagers on the internet.
Pepe the Frog is, in fact, the modern-day avatar of an ancient Egyptian deity accidentally resurrected by online imageboard culture.
Does that sound like the most [bat****] crazy thing you’ve ever heard?
Strap in, friendo. You’re in for one hell of a ride.
(UPDATE 11/9/16: Well memed, America, well memed. A post-election follow-up to this article has been added here.)
The precise origins of Pepe the Frog are, like all imageboards memes, obscure and unimportant.
All you really need to know is that sometime around 2010, a sad-looking cartoon frog began to trend among posters on 4chan.org and similar “underground” imageboards.
Shortly after, the age-old piece of online vernacular used to express laughter—”LOL”—fell out of favor on these sites.
In its place a new slang term of synonymous meaning rose to common use: “KEK.”
The origins of this trend are much more important. It comes from an odd technicality involving the Korean language and the popular video game World of Warcraft.
Keep that in mind for later.
And so, just like that, two seemingly unrelated elements that would later give life to a deity were arranged in piecemeal fashion. But they remained dormant for several years, up until…
By this time, Pepe the Frog had become the unofficial mascot for 4chan’s political discussion board (a highly despised corner of the Internet fittingly entitled “Politically Incorrect”).
/Pol/ is a place where the unspoken outsiders of Millennial culture gather en masse. Here you’ll find the lonely and depressed, the socially inept, the generational dropouts, and all shades of disenfranchised youth—every one of them united with an unshakable underdog mentality that pervades the forum’s every kilobyte.
To call this place a “white nationalist” or “alt-right” message board is categorically incorrect. /Pol/, above all else, is place where our society’s status quo is mercilessly challenged. It’s a melting pot for well-meaning free thinkers and misguided mad men alike.
It is a place of chaos.
So when Donald J. Trump strolled onto the political scene in 2015, it was a match made in heaven. He immediately became /pol/’s candidate of choice.
And it wasn’t long before Trump was mated with /pol/’s beloved mascot, in typical imageboard fashion:
And then, something very strange began to happen…
One last thing you need to understand about imageboard culture: dubs.
Every post on 4chan and similar venues comes with an 8-digit numerical stamp. This number represents that post’s entry position in the entire posting lineage of the imageboard.
With the amount of traffic these sites get, the last couple digits of this number are essentially a random roll. When a poster gets repeated digits, its called “dubs”, “trips”, “quads”, and so on.
Since a poster can’t know their post number until after they’ve submitted the post, its common for people to “bet” the contents of their message on the occurrence of repeating digits, like so:
When that endeavor proves a successful, a “GET” has been made and the stroke of luck is celebrated.
Out of this practice, a strange phenomenon began to take place on /pol/: discussion threads associated with Trump displayed noticeably frequent GETs.
It wasn’t long before all of these seemingly random elements discussed so far became irreparably tied together within imageboard culture:
…and a god was born.
Soon, it became all the rage on /pol/ to hail Trump as nothing less than god’s chosen candidate.
But which god’s chosen candidate exactly?
The answer is obvious: Kek.
Remember how we learned that “kek” the meme came about from an obscure Korean language onomatopoeia, completely independently from Pepe the Frog?
Well, it turns out Kek is also—and always has been—an ancient Egyptian deity…
A frog-headed one.
Quite the coincidence, wouldn’t you say? “A little,” perhaps you reply.
“A little” indeed, but that’s just the very tip of the synchronicity iceberg. That’s just where this unfathomable string of “coincidences” begins. And where it ends? We just don’t know. Day by day this all getting stranger…
The second major (“little”) coincidence can be found when one looks into what Kek stood for among the ancient Egyptian pantheon:
Kuk (also spelled as Kek or Keku) is the deification of the primordial concept of darkness in ancient Egyptian religion…
…Like all four dualistic concepts in the Ogdoad, Kuk’s male form was depicted as a frog, or as a frog-headed man, and the female form as a snake, or a snake-headed woman. As a symbol of darkness, Kuk also represented obscurity and the unknown, and thus chaos. Also, Kuk was seen as that which occurred before light, thus was known as the bringer-in of light.
And who else, at this point, had been declared a “bringer of light” into the world by enthusiastic supporters (mainstream and imageboard alike)?
The pot really started to boil when this bizarre misprint statuette was dug up from a mysterious vendor called “Ancient Treasures” on Amazon. For years the product had been coincidentally mislabeled a “KEK” statue, despite actually bearing the hieroglyphics for the frog goddess HEQET.
And ya know, the thing about this ONE unique arrangement of hieroglyphics…they bear an undeniable resemblance to a certain special something:
Do you see it?
A person sitting down. In front of a computer.
Like say, to post on an imageboard?
And what’s that on the other side of the computer?
With this “holy talisman’s” discovery, The Cult of Kek suddenly took on a concrete form. This new digital “faith” is summed up neatly in this image passed around on all the major imageboards of the day:
It Gets Weirder: Pepe/Keke “Emerges” in Plain Sight on September 11th, 2016
Soon, /pol/’s users were—quite ironically, at first—attributing all strokes of luck for the Trump campaign (and likewise, all strokes of misfortune for the Hillary campaign) to their benevolent frog-headed deity that spoke to them in dubs.
But all of that came to a head on September 11th, 2016, when three major, mind-blowing events transpired within 48 hours of each other. Three events that would change the face of Kek worship forever . . . .
Not if you've been over to the millenials' favorite site Reddit. Here is their The_Donald subReddit, where Pepe was extremely popular, especially after Hillary's Deplorables speech, earning herself the millenial Trump supporters' virulent contempt. And here is Reddit's Pepe archive.
I can't believe this country put a man on the f****g moon and now it's triggered by cartoon frogs.
what the f***
You and I have tangled, often.
But this article is fascinating.
Thanks for posting it.
I spend a lot of time on The_Donald, and have for nearly a year. After Hillary vilified Pepe some of the memes were defiant, but some were poignant. One thing about the centipedes: they love their Pepe frog.
Re my prior comment. I was thinking of the commercial value of the frog. For example, if Fury decided to do another graphic novel featuring Pepe, it would be a harder sell. A wildly popular meme is one thing, but a supposed hate symbol—per Hillary and the ADL—is entirely different.
You’re right about that, unless he finds a way to make it defiant and transcend the association.
That’s a good point. As you mentioned earlier, it’s a shame for the artist not to be able to profit from creating such a character. Hillary takes so little thought for things like that. She spots a meme that rubs her the wrong way, and blam—the frog is a hate symbol.
We are so blessed and fortunate that she lost.
Bears repeating! We are so blessed and fortunate that she lost!
:)
Awesome read. Way back when, I had the time & energy to be in on the Internetz. Now I’m just grateful to be filled in on what I missed. Thank you for posting.
Did you read the thread? Kek has nothing—zero—to do with Pepe’s origins. It is an association made by *some* after the fact.
Ping
Nerds!
I still haven’t signed up...too busy lurking. ;)
Late reply here. I visited this “underbelly of internet” and found these kids extremely annoying. I was arguing about something and was representing the conservative position and then a lot of posters came to “help” saying I am absolutely right and ... it is all because of Jews, Zionist Occupation Government and Hitler did nothing wrong.
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