This post has content warnings for: Racism, Homophobia, And those goddamned Pepe Frogs specifically.
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in reply to @ChocolateDave's post:
When I asked the FFZ creators to remove them (and other racist and ableist emotes of which their top 100 most used emotes in the add on is chock full of) one of them who used to be a friend sicked their followers on me calling me an idiot and throwing away a friendship in the process. They love that stupid racist frog. More than anything. And I don't get it.
I'm bumping up against this myself. It makes me super uncomfortable to see it used in chats and even more so when folks seem to get very bent out of shape when told it makes others uncomfortable. Its reaching the point where I stop telling folks "Hey the frog is racist please don't use it" and instead just end up dropping from streams that allow it.
Yeah, I just bounce. Not worth it. They can argue with the ADL if they want. Not worth my time.
100% agree. I hate it when I inadvertently use it too because I type something like "EZ" and then it shows the fucking frog on an on-stream chat. It's awful for all the reasons you state and it's ugly to boot. I don't understand the obsession.
yeah. i had this happen to me in a friends twitch chat some time ago and it was enough to convince me to not have a chat view on my stream with any of those "BetterTwitchTV" emotes (even if i like a good catJAM or ratJAM sometimes)
Need an emote of the moment that racist dipshit got punched in the face as he was explaining how his fellow racist dipshits love the frog
I used to believe that the frog could be reclaimed in a way that aligned with the creator’s original intent, but it’s just too tainted to save at this point. At least until it drops out of common usage, but even then I won’t miss seeing them around because all the variants are so damn ugly. Even without all the nasty connotations, Pepes are, at best, just lowest common denominator spam and I never really liked ‘em.
iterating on these same thoughts is what led to my summary encapsulation of this whole topic, which I've been using for a few years: you cannot reclaim a dogwhistle, you can only give it chaff.
Do you think that applies to the okay hand sign too? (Not trying to be a gotchya, I am legitimately curious what you think)
(Feel free to not engage)
harder call TBH, even a few years ago when its use was peaking; its prior history was much longer, much stronger, and still generally relevant. basically I'm not sure it ever actually made it to dogwhistle status: to distinguish from ambient casual usage, even among the in-group, it always had to be either hyper-accentuated (losing all subtlety) or just slapped alongside other obvious symbols. I can't remember a single time I was uncertain whether someone was using it innocently or not, and that makes it powerless. (note: for this purpose "ironic" is "not innocent," people don't get twisted into self-doubt on the whole subject by not being sure whether that was a real nazi or just a jackass troll.)
also I don't think I've seen it in like... two years? (except from Trump lol, but he's not indicative of much.) which would seem to indicate they saw the same thing and fell off pushing it? that might be self-selection in my media consumption though.
so from my observations I'd say probably not, but with the caveat that I spend much less time looking in places where it is/was relevant, than in direct proximity to the primary frog habitat.
ive been thinking lately about how pepe's real power with the right might be mostly that they were able to hijack a cultural icon and make it their own thing. and also that it probably only happened cuz it was a kinda ugly drawing nobody was that attached to... and as part of a dime a dozen goofus and gallant meme at the time it was hijacked too.
but either way they still see it as a cultural victory to parade about even a decade later. and the follow-up attempts to that success included trying to claim stuff like the concept of drinking milk, which was a harder thing to sell for various reasons.
eh, they have enough of a capture on Norse mythology that I squint very hard at games and other media using any part of it. but yeah in terms of current or recent culture it might be their only success...
The most annoying argument I've heard is "oh but this is peepo, it's not pepe!" and if that's not virginia fucking creeper I don't know what is
Didn't Matt Furie also make Pepes into a fuckin' NFT collection during the NFT craze too?
He did. I don't like that he did it, but if he got some money out of the racists that stole his frog then I forgive him.
Yeah, the fact that he himself is a shameless grifter piece of shit really undermined the attempts to paint him as some wounded victim of the whole thing.
from "feels good man" to being a thing that a lot of people detest. i hate seeing random pepe emojis. i hate it.
been constantly pushing back a Strong urge to write up a similar post lately. Thanks for sharing your feelings.
It gets worse when Tumblr users decided "Fuck you, I'll keep using it."
Sometimes you gotta burn down the whole garden in a way to prepare for new growth.
...I know we're talking in metaphors, but please don't burn poison ivy. It'll get in your lungs that way.
This landed my grandma in the hospital with chemical burns in her lungs.
Appreciate Brian 'Limmy' Limmond's completely unshakeable stance on these emotes "if I see a fuckin pepe in my chat, your getting banned"
the weird recusive metacomedy of limmy discovering the existence of limmy pepe is something.
feel really uncomftrable when I see pepe in people who seem decent's chats. like, i don't know them really well, do I tell them that it's a nazi frog or what?
The Ivy metaphor is a really good one. You see a patch of it on your path, do you spend the time to sort out if it's Creeper or Ivy? Or do you simply avoid it all together? You notice it growing in your own garden, where ivy has tried to grow before. Do you sort it and get poisoned again, or take precaution and risk removing a creeper you don't care for either way?
Also I was looking up the etymology of "crypto fascist" and found this Wikipedia quote about a 1937 document containing the term: "the term is not linked to secret support or admiration of fascism but it is used to refer to someone who is insufficiently conscious when displaying such regressive tendencies."
Thus pepe emotes: the tools of crypto fascists by the old definition AND the new
I have the same feeling towards the twitch kappa emote, it's just too constantly appropriated by shitheads who desperately have the urge to shout "THIS IS A JOKE, DO YOU GET IT?" to an audience that should not care.
good jokes don't need to be told that it's a joke, and the pepe shit-toad is just a low-key signal for wannabe white-supremacists who can't draw norse symbols. I never stay on any stream that allows use of it.
Sometimes people who do a ton of shit to accommodate just draw a line in the sand and go, "literally just this one thing, cmon."
the idea that this is them accommodating us is such a perfect encapsulation of what's wrong here.
I had a heart to heart with a friend once, when our friendship was getting strained. I wont get into the depths of it, but it went like this. I asked them to do a, b, and c for me. they obliged. I later asked for d, e, and f, and they obliged. This went down the list but what frustrated them is there wasn't any time that I'd accepted any sort of push back or request or explanation from them to these things.
It isn't that z is some big thing, its that a-y came before it. It sorta made me change my look on stuff.
it's kinda different when the things you're asking for are all variations on "please take your boot off my chest."
I hate the frog too. I'm a moderator at a Discord a friend runs, and if I see someone use the frog they immediately go into a mental list of people to keep an eye on. I can't warn them for using the frog, as much as I want to, because that's not in the rules. But it's a tell.
I recently bought a game bundle to support an indie dev that's been going for a decade thinking yeah they've said some weird shit but they seem to be better now. And then they used the frog in a marketing campaign and regretted giving them a couple of bucks.
100%. Pepe's not a remotely difficult call. There are a lot of times when it's difficult to find the balance between what people should feel free to express in a given setting that might upset other people. It's not simple; people can be triggered by a lot of fairly benign things. This ain't one of those times! Anyone who doesn't understand why Pepe's out of bounds in 2024 isn't worth explaining it to.
i do not understand the obsession with these frogs. its such an ugly goddamned thing. everything about it is ugly! the worst, vomit-inducing color palette. the shapes, the expressions... it's capital-U Ugly. i could understand people liking the frogs if the designs were at least cute, but it's not! not the original frog, not the spinoff frogs, not even the themed not-frog emotes that are based off of them (because they traced over the same ugly shape language!!)
so then for me it becomes, "okay so not only is this streamer/community fine with a nazi dogwhistle, but they also have shitty taste in aesthetics, too," and i begin to wonder about things like "would they be angry about the urinal or the banana taped to the wall?"
The only thing I would slightly push back on here (not the rejection of Pepe, it’s now entirely a hate symbol and should be treated as such), is the idea that liking intentionally ugly things means someone doesn’t have taste. Ugly characters (wario, Rugrats, Homestuck etc) and, more broadly, ugliness have a place in our visual language. It being ugly or beautiful doesn’t make it any better or worse,. You could, for example, argue that the swastika is a beautiful symbol (and is in fact regarded as such in some non-nazi cultural contexts) and there are plenty of racist uses of “cute” anime characters. I understand what you’re saying but I think it’s wise to separate aesthetic taste from the actual problem, which is the use of dogwhistles to support white supremacy.
I feel similar things about wojak as well. Just major ick vibes off of those things, and yet they're even harder to avoid.
any of that channer meme culture shit now is just an immediate red flag for regressive horse shit.
Love this metaphor. I'm from virginia, and I have also been immune to poison ivy for most of my life. I plow through it like nothing, my sister needs literal steroids and was hospitalized once from touching it though. Lots of people immune to poison ivy trying to insist that there's no danger of itching or hospitalization.