“The negative baggage surrounding Pepe just doesn’t exist on TikTok,” said Jones. The contrast between white nationalist frog Twitter and today’s #frogtiktok, then, is almost total. The green frog became a swastika with plausible deniability. In 20, hate-spewing Twitter users added frog emojis to their bios as a kind of code. “Pepe images became tools for trolling people on social media, where you could say something that was really offensive, really bigoted, really angry, really threatening - and then you could always step away and be like, ‘it’s this dumb silly cartoon frog, why are you so triggered by it,’” said Jones. They re-drew Pepe in Nazi uniform or bombing the Twin Towers, making him politically pestilential. As Pepe’s popularity crossed over from hardcore internet users to mainstream “normies” and even celebrities, his early fans cruelly asserted their dominance.
“When Pepe became toxic, it was a reaction to social media bringing the general public into the internet,” Arthur Jones, who directed the recent Pepe documentary Feels Good Man, said in an interview. Still from Feels Good Man produced by Ready Fictions and directed by Arthur Jones (image courtesy of Ready Fictions) When fans first uploaded the image to online message boards in 2009, Furie didn’t object, and when Pepe became a hugely popular meme with his catchphrase “feels good, man,” he didn’t assert copyright. Illustrator Matt Furie originally introduced his bug-eyed, anthropomorphic frog in 2005 as the innocent protagonist of the stoner comic Boys Club. Pepe, who is probably still the best-known internet frog specimen, underwent his own dramatic transformation around 2015. On the internet, they’re not even just frogs. As symbols of transformation, frogs are never just one thing. Maybe that’s what makes them such enduring subjects in human culture, from ancient Egyptian fertility gods to latent fairytale princes. For these amphibians, identity is a slippery thing. But in their most recent online habitat, TikTok, frogs have transcended Pepe’s toxic connotations, emerging with cheerful, queer associations instead. Most infamously, the bright green cartoon Pepe the frog spread like a digital plague as a symbol of the far right. Memes from Kermit the frog sipping tea to the pixelated, unicycle-riding frog “Dat Boi” have proliferated on Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter. Though endangered in real life, frogs might be the internet’s most invasive species. “They make me laugh every day.” In August, she shared the humor with some seven million viewers, posing Sativa and Indica inside a Victorian dollhouse while playing Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5.” “I always see them in weird positions in their tank, doing weird things,” Meagher said in an interview. So she settled for two tree frogs, Sativa and Indica, now the stars of her viral TikTok videos.
Tara Meagher, a 22-year-old film student, wanted a quarantine pet, but didn’t have room for a dog in her small Los Angeles apartment.