Pepe the Frog creator left baffled by Pepe emotes on Twitch

Pepe the Frog is one of the most widely-circulated memes ever, and a fixture of Twitch chat spam. When its creator, Matt Furie, discovered Pepes had become a fixture of Twitch chat, he was left rather confused.

Pepe the Frog is massive. Originally created by Matt Furie back in 2005 for a comic series called Boy’s Club, Pepe has spread from regular internet text memes to Twitch emotes.

On his January 30 stream, content creator TriHex – face of the “TriHard” emote – brought Furie onto his Twitch livestream as part of a discussion on the documentary Feels Good Man, which charts the creation and story of Pepe the Frog.

The discussion soon delved into how Pepes have become a huge part of Twitch culture, given the prominence of Pepe emotes in Twitch chat. Furie was left somewhat confused.

During the stream, Furie was introduced to the use of Pepes in Twitch chat.

“It just seems everyone who’s saying that stuff is insane. No offense, I don’t see these images, I just see these words.”

Of course, Pepe emotes aren’t available in the vanilla form of Twitch, meaning they have to be viewed via a third-party browser extension, like BTTV or FrankerFaceZ. As Furie didn’t have that extension enabled, he was only seeing the raw text.

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One of his producers then got confused by the existence of “MonkaW”, before a screengrab of a selection of Pepe emotes was brought up to provide an explanation.

Trihex had to reassure Furie that, given the controversial hijacking of Pepe in the past by certain political groups, this was merely a bit of fun with no hateful connotations.

Furie was clearly eager to learn more about a side of the internet that was completely new to him, and also endorsed the power expression the internet provides people.

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He added: “What happened when we discovered the internet? We discovered people like to share things with each other. People like to share pictures and music with each other. People like to share their lives and feelings. That’s all cool.”

Either way, it was a great insight as to how bizarre and inaccessible Twitch culture can be to outsiders, especially considering Furie had unintentionally created a cornerstone of Twitch culture.