Pepe the Frog

The Pepe the Frog specimen presents one of the most complex cases in the lab’s entire archive. No other meme has been simultaneously classified as a hate symbol by a major civil rights organization, adopted as a pro-democracy icon by Hong Kong protesters, sold at Sotheby’s as fine art, and tokenized into a multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency. Pepe is not a meme — he is a Rorschach test for the internet age, a green mirror reflecting whatever the viewer most wants or fears to see.

The Comic

In 2005, Matt Furie — a painter and illustrator based in San Francisco — created a zine called Boy’s Club. The comic featured four anthropomorphic roommates: Pepe (a frog), Brett (a dog-like creature), Andy (a weird bird-thing), and Landwolf (essentially a wolf). The vibe was aggressively low-stakes: the characters ate pizza, played video games, and did the kind of nothing that constitutes most of one’s twenties. The art was loose, the humor was stoner-adjacent, and the intended audience was approximately twelve people at comic conventions.

In one panel, Pepe is discovered by his roommates urinating with his pants pulled all the way down to his ankles. His response, delivered with a slack-jawed expression of total serenity: “feels good man.”

That panel — that specific face, that specific phrase — would eventually be extracted from its context, uploaded to an anonymous imageboard, and set in motion a chain of cultural events that would involve the president of the United States, the Anti-Defamation League, pro-democracy revolutionaries, and a $7 billion financial instrument. Matt Furie was drawing a comic about a frog who liked to pee. The internet had other plans.

The Extraction

The “feels good man” panel appeared on 4chan’s /b/ (random) board sometime around 2008. The exact date is unknowable — 4chan’s ephemerality is both its defining feature and its archivist’s nightmare. What we know is that users on /b/ began using the cropped Pepe face as a reaction image. The comic’s context — friends, pizza, urination — was irrelevant. What mattered was the expression: a face of pure, unreflective satisfaction. In a space defined by irony, cynicism, and performative nihilism, Pepe’s guileless contentment was either a relief or a provocation.

This is the moment the lab classifies as “context severance” — when a meme-gene detaches from its host organism (the comic) and begins replicating independently. Matt Furie’s Pepe was a character. 4chan’s Pepe was a feeling.

The Emotional Spectrum

What happened next was rapid speciation. Within a year, users had redrawn Pepe’s face to express emotions far beyond the original “feels good man” contentment:

Sad Pepe (2009): The mouth curves downward. Tears stream from the eyes. “Feels bad man.” This inversion proved that Pepe’s power wasn’t in any single emotion but in his function as an emotional vessel. The same basic template — green face, bulbous eyes, simple features — could be tuned to any frequency on the human emotional spectrum.

Smug Pepe (2010): Eyes half-closed, lips curled into the slightest smirk. This variant radiates the specific energy of someone who just won an argument on the internet and wants to ensure you know they know it. Smug Pepe became 4chan’s default face of superiority — the reaction image equivalent of adjusting your glasses before delivering a devastating rebuttal.

Angry Pepe / REEEEEE (2014): Veins bulging, mouth torn open in a primal scream. The caption is always “REEEEEE” — a sound supposedly derived from the noise frogs make when startled. (Actual frog vocalizations do not sound like this. Reality is not the point.) Angry Pepe emerged as a response to “normies” — the 4chan term for mainstream internet users — adopting and diluting what 4chan considered its proprietary cultural production.

The emotional range mattered because it transformed Pepe from a meme template into a meme language. You didn’t just post Pepe — you spoke Pepe. Sad Pepe for loss, Smug Pepe for victory, Angry Pepe for invasion of your cultural territory. This is why Pepe survived when thousands of other reaction images didn’t. He wasn’t one joke. He was an entire emotional vocabulary rendered in amphibian form.

The Rare Pepe Economy

In 2014, something remarkable emerged: users began creating elaborately illustrated, one-of-a-kind Pepe variants and treating them as scarce digital collectibles. Rare Pepes depicted the frog as Mona Lisa, as astronauts, as Renaissance popes, as every possible cultural figure reimagined in green. The “economy” ran on social enforcement — if you shared a Rare Pepe too widely, it lost its value. If someone saved your Rare Pepe without permission, you responded with Angry Pepe.

This was, without exaggeration, a functioning digital art market based entirely on social consensus about scarcity — no blockchain, no smart contracts, no tokens. Just vibes and mutual understanding that some JPEGs were worth more than others because the community agreed they were. The Rare Pepe movement presaged NFTs by approximately five years. When the NFT boom arrived in 2021, original Rare Pepes were sold at Sotheby’s. A “Homer Simpson Pepe” created in 2016 sold for $320,000 in 2022. The market that 4chan users built as a joke became a market that Christie’s-adjacent auction houses took seriously. There is no lesson here except possibly “everything is a market.”

The Political Capture

The 2016 United States presidential election is the inflection point that Pepe cannot escape. During the campaign, supporters of Donald Trump on 4chan and Reddit began creating “Trump Pepe” — images of the frog in a Trump wig, at Trump rallies, making Trump faces. On October 13, 2015, Trump himself retweeted a Pepe-Trump fusion image. A presidential candidate was now signal-boosting a cartoon frog from a stoner comic.

The adoption accelerated. Alt-right communities on 4chan’s /pol/ (politically incorrect) board began using Pepe in explicitly racist, antisemitic, and white supremacist contexts. Pepe appeared in SS uniforms, in concentration camp imagery, in every flavor of hate speech the internet could produce. The mechanics were deliberate: by saturating a popular symbol with extreme content, these groups could simultaneously communicate in-group signals and troll mainstream observers who didn’t understand the layers of irony (or claimed not to).

On September 12, 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign website published an article titled: “Donald Trump, Pepe the Frog, and White Supremacists: An Explainer.” The article, which earnestly attempted to explain 4chan meme culture to voters, was received by the internet as either a necessary warning or the funniest thing that had happened in the entire campaign. Both readings were correct.

Two weeks later, the Anti-Defamation League added Pepe to its hate symbols database. The ADL was careful to note that “the majority of uses of Pepe the Frog have been, and continue to be, parsing of Pepe in a non-bigoted context.” But the damage was done. A presidential campaign and a major civil rights organization had both officially designated a frog from a stoner comic as politically significant. Matt Furie’s creation, drawn with the intention of communicating that it feels good to urinate, was now in the same database as the swastika.

The Creator’s War

Matt Furie’s response evolved from bewilderment to grief to legal warfare. In May 2017, he published a one-page comic strip in which Pepe’s friends attend his funeral — an attempt to symbolically kill the character and cut the cord between his creation and its political co-option. The internet did not cooperate. You cannot kill a meme by killing its source. Doge outlived Kabosu; Pepe would outlive Furie’s intentions for him by an even wider margin.

Furie then turned to copyright law. His legal team began sending DMCA takedown notices and filing lawsuits against far-right figures and organizations that used Pepe in merchandise. He won a $15,000 settlement from InfoWars in 2019. Additional settlements followed. The legal campaign was partially successful — it removed some commercial exploitation — but it could not address the fundamental problem: millions of people had already internalized Pepe as theirs, in whatever context they chose.

The #SavePepe campaign, a partnership between Furie and the ADL, attempted to flood the internet with positive Pepe content to dilute the hate-symbol association. This is the memetic equivalent of trying to unpour a glass of water. You can add more water. You cannot remove what’s already been poured.

The Hong Kong Inversion

In August 2019, Pepe underwent the most dramatic contextual inversion in meme history. Pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong — who were being tear-gassed, beaten, and surveilled by authorities acting under Beijing’s pressure — adopted Pepe as their symbol of resistance. The frog appeared on protest signs, was spray-painted on walls, and was shared across encrypted messaging apps like Telegram.

Hong Kong’s Pepe wore a yellow construction hard hat and a gas mask. He held an umbrella — a callback to the 2014 Umbrella Movement. He was drawn crying tear gas, not sad tears. He was Pepe, but he was Hong Kong Pepe — a completely different organism wearing the same skin.

This matters enormously because it demolishes the “Pepe is a hate symbol” classification with a real-world counterexample at scale. The same image that the ADL cataloged alongside Nazi iconography was being used by Asian pro-democracy activists fighting authoritarian repression. The protesters were aware of the Western context — they were using Pepe because he was subversive, because adopting a Western internet symbol demonstrated Hong Kong’s cultural alignment with the West rather than with Beijing. The hate-symbol classification was not just inaccurate in this context; it was actively inverted.

This is the lab’s strongest evidence for what we call “memetic sovereignty” — the principle that a meme’s meaning is determined by its users, not its history. Pepe has no inherent meaning. He means whatever the person posting him means. This is what makes him dangerous to anyone who wants to control meaning, and invaluable to anyone who wants to contest it.

The Coin

On April 14, 2023, an anonymous team launched the PEPE token on the Ethereum blockchain. There was no whitepaper, no roadmap, no utility, no pretense of being anything other than a memecoin riding Pepe’s cultural capital. The token description was essentially “a memecoin for the people.”

Within three weeks, PEPE reached a market cap of $1.6 billion. Trading volume on some days exceeded $2 billion — more than many S&P 500 companies. By May 2024, during the memecoin supercycle that also saw Dogwifhat, BONK, and dozens of Solana pump.fun tokens spike, PEPE surpassed $7 billion in market cap and entered the top 30 cryptocurrencies by capitalization.

Matt Furie did not authorize the token. Matt Furie does not receive royalties from the token. Matt Furie’s creation is, once again, generating massive financial value for people who are not Matt Furie. The pattern is by now familiar: the meme generates wealth; the creator does not capture it. Boy’s Club was self-published as a zine. The PEPE token peaked higher than the GDP of several nations.

The PEPE token also generated its own mutations — Pepe Punch (for breaking price resistance), various chain-specific Pepe derivatives on Solana and Base, and an entire ecosystem of “Pepe-adjacent” tokens that referenced the frog without directly using the name. The financialization loop was complete: a comic became a meme, the meme became a political symbol, the symbol became a cryptocurrency, and the cryptocurrency spawned its own sub-memes.

Mutation Phylogeny

Pepe’s mutation tree rivals Doge’s in breadth but surpasses it in thematic range. Where Doge mutations are largely tonal variations on the same joke (Comic Sans inner monologue, applied to different scenarios), Pepe mutations are contextual transplants — the same face inserted into radically different meaning-systems.

Apu Apustaja (2016) deserves special attention. Originating on Finnish imageboards, Apu is a simplified, crudely drawn version of Pepe with a rounder face and smaller features. Where Pepe proper carries the weight of his political history, Apu reads as innocent, vulnerable, childlike. He is Pepe’s younger brother who doesn’t know what happened to the family name. The Finnish origin adds a layer of cultural translation — “apu apustaja” means “help helper” in Finnish, which is either endearing or ominous depending on your perspective.

Wojak-Pepe fusions represent convergent evolution — two independently successful meme lineages hybridizing. Pepe wearing a Wojak mask (or vice versa) communicates concealed emotion: the face you show the world versus the face underneath. These hybrids are the most psychologically sophisticated meme templates the lab has cataloged, which is an absurd sentence to write about cartoon frogs but here we are.

The Verdict

Pepe the Frog is the most contested meme in internet history. He has been used to express joy, sadness, superiority, rage, racism, anti-racism, democracy, authoritarianism, financial speculation, fine art, and the simple feeling of urinating with your pants down. He has been classified as a hate symbol and a freedom symbol. He has generated billions of dollars in cryptocurrency value for people who didn’t create him, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal settlements for the person who did.

The lab’s classification is simple: Pepe is a meaning-carrier with no fixed meaning. He is the ultimate reaction image because he reacts to everything by becoming it. His power is not in what he says but in his infinite capacity to be spoken through. This is why he cannot be killed, reclaimed, or controlled. Every attempt to fix Pepe’s meaning — as wholesome, as hateful, as financial, as political — fails because the next user simply reassigns him.

Virality index: 10/10. Not because of spread alone, but because Pepe has achieved something beyond virality — semantic autonomy. He means everything. He means nothing. Feels good, man.