ya poss tlarn

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Appreciate Brian 'Limmy' Limmond's completely unshakeable stance on these emotes "if I see a fuckin pepe in my chat, your getting banned"

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."

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?"

I feel similar things about wojak as well. Just major ick vibes off of those things, and yet they're even harder to avoid.

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.

Thank you for your succinct and well-stated explanation on what dog whistles actually are. More people need to see that.