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 . . . .
Good stuff, Rude.
Happy to have the Pepe People on the train.
Nice!
” FReepers have always been mean as snakes, “
I think you’re being paged..
What is with the ridiculous formatting here? I feel like I’m looking at some conspiracy nut’s website.
LOL and KEK are both palindromes. Coincidence? I think not!
That was a fun read. Loved the hieroglyphics explanation.
Which betrayal was that? Memory blurs. Was it the immigration "reform"?
It's because you are so special.
Yes, immigration reform. “You just hate brown people.”
I must be, if I was capable of posting to you, ‘Imagine if Cochran were Republican.’
I guess I was struck by how little attention his ‘senior moments,’ elicit. But the fact that he’s Establishment/Uniparty must inure him.
Your link didn't work. Try it again?
Sept. 13, 2016 It's Not Easy Being Meme
Sept. 13, 2016 What Happens When Hillary Clinton Calls Your Cartoon Frog Racist
Sept. 28, 2016 Exclusive: The Creator of Pepe the Frog Is Voting for Hillary
Nov. 4, 2016 The campaign to save Pepe the Frog
That said, there is much more substance and thoughtful posts here on FR, while on The_Donald, most posts are a paragraph or less and is more focused on memes and witty one-liners. You do need a thicker skin on FR though.
In conclusion, there's more than enough room on the Internet for both to thrive.
Thanks for posting. I read one of the interviews. It was interesting. I didn’t realize the frog is copyrighted. Funny that the artist was voting for Hillary, and she’s the one who attacked Pepe. I still think the ADL hate symbol aspect was overblown.
But what do I know? I chose, again, not to research the subject too deeply.
LOL — terrific graphic!
This issue interested me because my business dealt with commercial artists for a period of time, and I was very conscious of their rights. This guy, if he had two cents for every time that drawing of his has been appropriated, could retire very comfortably after last year’s campaign. The internet has been hell on artists.
I would imagine the frog is worth a lot less after Hillary and the ADL publicly pretended it was a hate symbol.
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