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 . . . .
Memes
One thing I noticed over there, is that they don't roast each other, as many do here at FR. I've been at FR since 2000 and lurked for a couple of years before joining. It's one of the changes I've seen over the years that I wish didn't happen.
I’m tired of doing other people’s research for them.
Nobody directed me to the website/resource, Know Your Memes. I somehow found it for myself. I found it, in fact, when I was researching Pepe the Frog. I learned every precise detail of Pepe’s origin. It took very little time, and was quite interesting.
The author has undertaken an article to explain Pepe. How is that remotely possible, without taking the few minutes required to learn the origin of the frog, and why he caught on at 4-chan?
What? Signing up to FR used to be a very intimidating prospect, FReepers have always been mean as snakes, lol. They're not as mean now as they were in 2000, I can assure you, I lurked for years myself before signing up. It took W's 2nd term betrayal immediately after inauguration to get me to finally do it.
Well, cough it up. Stop playing coy. What, do you have a blog somewhere, want to make a few pennies from Google?
Why so smug?
Your snark is noted.
Actually I’m wondering how it’s possible for me to invest truly minimal amounts of time and learn basic, common facts while others seemingly cannot. If Pepe in fact has a precise, definite origin, and if you were going to write an entire article on Pepe, would you not at least attempt to learn where he came from?
And now, I have found it for myself . . . genius thing, the web (and bulletin boards in particular). See, the thing is, I found something on the internet that I found to be funny, and it never crossed my mind that I should research the subject in depth before posting it here in order to keep from disturbing your delicate sensibilities.
T O P KEK!
O
P
K
E
K
!
Pepe was a cartoon character from a strip some ten years ago.
If someone can convince me that I’m the only person on this thread capable of doing even the most basic Internet research, then I will revisit the site, and post the address plus a pertinent excerpt,
Going strictly from memory, I believe it was a graphic novel.
I had to go finish the rest. :) Totally fascinating, true or not. Thanks for a break from all the stressful news today.
You’re the one making the claim, so it’s incumbent upon you to back it up when challenged. I don’t see anything really wrong with the origin as described, other than being very brief to the point of omissions here and there, but it’s not inaccurate as you claim.
Again, you claim it’s incorrect? Back it up rather than flouncing around in a huff because INTERNET!
I prefer adding to the Kek mythos. It’s entertaining if nothing else. After all, it’s just a cartoon frog!
In a huff? Is that projection? I’m stunned that the author of the Pepe article couldn’t or wouldn’t spend five minutes, max, learning about the origin of the frog. Why even write an article, if even that minimal level of research is too much to ask?
But in a huff, no. Not in the least.
The best way to describe Kek as the made up Deity of internet trolls.
As a matter of fact, you bring-up a very interesting point: it’s a meme, and nothing about it needs to be accurate.
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