Arts
Wednesday, September 23, 2020 — 13 

Pepe the Frog’s fall from 
grace in ‘Feels Good Man’

This 
review 
has 
taken 

longer to write than I, or my 
editors, expected. In the last 
few days my time has been 
spent digesting the insidious 
darkness that characterizes 
“Feels 
Good 
Man.” 
This 

documentary 
follows 
the 

tale of Pepe the Frog and the 
character-turned-meme’s 
journey to become a symbol 
of hate. But it is also a tale of 
depravity fueled by anonymity, 
of how social media is both a 
reflection and a perversion of 
real social life, and a chapter 
in the grand history of white 
nationalism in America. The 
very sour cherry atop this 
sundae of reckless hatred is 
the man behind the meme 
— Matt Furie, Pepe’s own 
Dr. Frankenstein — whose 
innocent 
cartoon 
was 

bastardized by the internet, 
shattering his psyche. “Feels 
Good Man” is not for the faint 
of heart. I am left questioning 
my own “stamina” in the face 
of hatred. 

Furie 
created 
Pepe 
in 

2005 for his “Boy’s Club” 
comic. The lanky frog was an 
innocuous character with one 
particularly peculiar habit: He 
peed with his pants around his 
ankles. When questioned about 
this idiosyncrasy, Pepe could 
only say “feels good man.” How 
did a cartoon frog’s bathroom 
habits make the character an 
icon for the alt-right? For that, 
we can blame the internet.

Pepe’s 
circuitous 
journey 

into internet hell really began 
on 4chan, where anonymous 

users jockeyed for a spot at the 
top of one of the site’s message 
boards by eliciting reactions 
from 
their 
peers. 
This 

feature of 4chan meant that 
provocativeness was valuable. 
To be number one, you had to 
garner attention and incite a 
reaction. This will spell Pepe’s 
downfall.

The documentary features 

a few 4chan users, who share 
that 
they 
saw 
themselves 

in Pepe; their own peculiar 
habits, embodied by the self-
proclaimed 
moniker 
NEET 

(Not in Education, Employment 
or Training), made them “feel 
good,” too. Pepe represented 
an 
internet 
counterculture, 

those who felt rejected by 
mainstream society.

The problems began when 

Pepe memes leaked out of 4chan 
and onto Instagram, Facebook 
and other mainstream social 
media. Pepe had been taken by 
“normies,” the socially well-
adjusted people who are seen 
to represent the oppressors 
of NEETs, the relegation of 
the less well-adjusted to a 
lesser social status. So, while 
4chan users had already been 
making Pepe a provocateur, 
to 
keep 
“normies” 
from 

stealing the symbol of the 
counterculture, and to prevent 
Pepe from gaining mainstream 
recognition, the memes had to 
be so offensive and distasteful 
that no one would dare touch 
Pepe again.

All told, a group of people 

who felt they were being 
actively kept at the bottom 
rung of society now had a 
tool to push back. And by 
pasting their virulent racist 
rhetoric atop a cartoon frog, 

they made real bigotry into a 
joke. Fighting Pepe would be 
farcical, because it was “just 
a meme.” Hillary Clinton was 
lambasted 
by 
the 
alt-right 

for doing precisely this. This 
twisted irony is at the center 
of 
Pepe’s 
most 
despicable 

associations.

When “smug Pepe,” a meme 

in which the frog touches 
his chin and dons a sinister 
smirk, made its rounds, people 
compared it to Trump’s mug 
on the cover of GQ in 1984 and 
the association between then-
candidate Trump and Pepe 
was solidified. Trump-Pepe 
memes became more common, 
with Trump himself tweeting 
an illustration of himself as 
the racist frog. As Trump’s 
policies began to interact with 
the 
meme-ing 
provocateurs 

on 4chan, Pepe’s status as a 
genuine symbol of the alt-right 
was undeniable. 

One of the documentary’s 

more prominent interviewees 
is Susan Blackmore, scholar 
and author of “The Meme 
Machine,” a text exploring 
Richard Dawkins’s memetic 
theory. 
Blackmore 
believes, 

in short, that ideas are spread 
autonomously by human “meme 
machines.” Like evolutionary 
gene theory, in which the 
stronger 
biological 
traits 

outlast and supersede weaker 
ones, meme theory says that 
certain ideas will outlast and 
overpower others. Blackmore 
says that “culture … is more 
like a vast parasite growing 
and living and feeding on us 
than a tool of our creation.” 
In other words, culture is 
memes, shared by humans in 
the form of language, religion, 

art and Pepe. For Blackmore, 
memes share themselves. She 
doesn’t address this in the 
documentary; however, I am 
curious if she would ascribe 
any culpability to the millions 
of people who have created and 
shared offensive Pepe images 
in the decade or so since he 
took the internet by storm.

While images may share 

themselves by way of the 
human 
“meme 
machine” 

mind, this transmission can 
certainly be manipulated and 
directed. Another remarkable 
interviewee is a former Trump 
campaign official who spoke 
matter-of-factly 
about 
the 

campaign’s use of social media 
to win support. In criticizing 
Matt 
Furie’s 
#SavePepe 

quest 
in 
partnership 
with 

the Anti-Defamation League 
to reclaim the meme, this 
former 
campaign 
official 

suggested that Furie failed to 
understand the internet and its 
machinations. In many ways, 
this campaign official is right: 
#SavePepe backfired, and the 
Peace, Love and Pepe memes 
were co-opted and swiftly 

desecrated. 

In 
a 
September 
2016 

interview with Adam Serwer 
for The Atlantic (who is also 
featured in the film), Furie says 
“I think that’s it’s just a phase, 
and come November, it’s just 
gonna go on to the next phase 
… in terms of meme culture, 
it’s 
people 
reappropriating 

things for their own agenda. 
That’s just a product of the 
internet.” It seems Furie takes 
a view similar to Blackmore’s 
of memetics and acknowledges 
the entropic character of the 
internet. What’s unsettling, 
though, is Furie’s confidence 
that white nationalism would 
all go away.

If this country has seen 

anything in the four years since 
Furie’s interview with Serwer, 
it is that hatred is not “just a 
phase.” The very foundation of 
our society is constructed from 
inequity and bigotry. In this 
moment of reckoning, we must 
be hyper-aware of the “jokes,” 
because 
hatred 
masked 
as 

humor is insidious.

The film is not entirely 

without hope. Pepe has been 

taken up by protestors in 
Hong Kong as a symbol of 
love. Alex Jones of InfoWARS 
settled out of court with Furie 
after Pepe’s creator sued the 
vicious 
conspiracy 
theorist 

for 
copyright 
infringement. 

Furie, 
whose 
sadness 
and 

guilt are upsettingly palpable 
throughout 
the 
film, 
has 

moved onto new projects. His 
art is really something. 

Despite 
developments 
in 

Hong Kong, a recent expedition 
to 4chan showed me that in the 
U.S., Pepe is beyond salvation. 
But our democracy is not. As 
we continue to fight hatred in 
America, pay close attention 
to the potentially dangerous 
power of the meme, especially 
wielded 
by 
anonymous 

idealogues. This summer of 
organizing and resistance has 
shown that the internet can 
be a potent force for good and 
change. Let us embrace this in 
the hopes that we might shift 
the tide of memetics in our 
favor. And for the love of Pepe, 
VOTE.

Daily Arts Writer Ross London can 

be reached at rhorg@umich.edu.

ROSS LONDON
Daily Arts Writer

MOVIECLIPS INDIE

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Raised by RuneScape: my 
extremely online childhood

When I describe myself as being 

“extremely online” to my friends, 
they usually agree — they too 
love memes and spend hours on 
Twitter.

Trying to clarify what I mean 

gets messy. It usually turns into 
some form of me reciting my own 
version of Bane’s quote from “The 
Dark Knight Rises”: “You merely 
adopted the internet; I was born in 
it, molded by it.”

If I was molded by the internet, 

“RuneScape” was the pair of hands 
that shaped me.

By the time I reached third 

grade, I was in the internet 
trenches. Deep in the trenches. 
I’m talking roleplaying “Pokémon” 
on 
fansite 
forums, 
watching 

Naruto fan flash animations on 
Saiyan Island, trying to learn the 
dance 
from 
“Caramelldansen” 

and consuming dozens of Strong 
Bad emails on Homestar Runner. 
According to the record books, 
June 21, 2007 was the first time 
I logged into RuneScape. I spent 
the first of what would become 
thousands of hours glued to the 
computer. If “Pokémon” roleplay 
and Naruto fan flashes were the 
trenches, “RuneScape” was my 
ninth circle of digital hell.

For 
the 
uninitiated, 

“RuneScape” is an MMORPG 
(Massively 
Multiplayer 
Online 

Role-Playing Game), an open world 
fantasy multiplayer game where 
you play alongside thousands of 
other players. If you’ve ever played 
“World of Warcraft” or “Club 
Penguin,” you’ve played an MMO. 
They have an emphasis on social 
interaction, with in-game guilds 
and virtual economies. It’s the 
social aspect of “RuneScape” that 
shaped me most — where I learned 
everything from politics and pop 
culture, to learning what sex was 
and finding out Santa isn’t real.

As a young kid hooked on 

fantasy, “RuneScape” triggered 
all the right neurotransmitters in 
my brain. I could practice archery 
and slay dragons and do quests 
day and night. I loved the grind of 
mining coal or fishing for lobsters 
ad infinitum, selling them for gold 
and buying fashionable clothes 
for my character to wear while 
mining and fishing. Whenever I 
leveled up in “RuneScape,” a little 
animation of fireworks would 
display over my character; I can 
still feel that dopamine rush. My 
favorite thing to do was chat with 
other players while training — I 
would usually juggle three or four 
conversations at once. Meanwhile, 
back on planet Earth, I was going 
days without stepping outside. I 
rarely opened my mouth. Messages 
on “RuneScape” could be my only 

social interaction for days.

Before long, I grew so deeply 

immersed into my online identity 
that there was Dylan and then 
there 
was 
Smallbones25, 
my 

“RuneScape” username. By fourth 
grade I genuinely didn’t have a real-
life friend, but that never bothered 
me. I had friends in noodleboy12, 
a friend met fishing on the docks 
in Karamja, and Vortex King, 
a “RuneScape” veteran I met 
training in the Warrior’s Guild. My 
social life got even better when I 
adopted the alter-ego of a 17-year-
old girl named Kendra. When 
your character is a girl in a male-
dominated video game, friendship 
and conversation online come easy. 

Somewhere down the line my 

dad picked up on the unnatural 
amount of time I spent on my 
computer 
and 
the 
extreme 

emotional 
investment 
I 
had 

in “RuneScape.” As a parent, 
I can’t imagine how shameful 
and disappointing it must have 
felt 
when 
your 
eight-year-old 

son with no friends came to you 
bawling his eyes out because he 
got scammed in a video game or 
accidentally died and lost all his 
virtual possessions. It crossed the 
line when I started staying up too 
late and sleeping in on school days. 
My dad started cutting the internet 
on my computer at 7:30 p.m. on 
school nights. The first night I 
staged a pseudo-strike outside his 

DYLAN YONO
Daily Arts Writer

office, demanding my internet be 
reinstated. He ignored my futile 
protests, so I adapted. At 7:30 I 
would go to sleep for the night, and 
when the internet turned back on 
at 5 in the morning, I woke up to 
play “RuneScape” before school.

For a long time I was content 

with “RuneScape,” a constant in 
my life I didn’t know how to live 
without. Then puberty hit in sixth 
or seventh grade and my virtual 
friends were no longer enough for 
me. I started to acknowledge my 
hobby as an addiction. I started to 
recognize my lack of real 
friends as an inadequacy, a 
personal failure. I wanted 
to be one of the “cool kids,” 
and those kids were talking 
to girls on Facebook and 
wearing fake Gucci Belts, 
not slaying dragons on 
“RuneScape.” If I wanted 
to be cool, I’d have to quit 
“RuneScape” and instead 
play “Call of Duty” with 
them and drop slurs on 
Xbox Live.

I 
quit 
“RuneScape” 

cold turkey. For the next 
few years I dreaded and 
resented 
the 
addictive 

game upon which I built 
my prepubescent social life. 
Making friends in middle school 
felt like a desperate attempt to 
catch up on what I missed out on 
for so long. In the deepest pits of my 
eighth-grade depression, I blamed 
“RuneScape” for my complete 
lack of social skills and feared 
it for its life-shattering power. I 
clocked in over 2,000 hours on my 
main “RuneScape” account and 
easily thousands more that went 
uncounted, and what did it give 
me?

I thought: “RuneScape” doesn’t 

give, it only takes. Mostly, I thought 
“RuneScape” 
took 
away 
my 

childhood. I’d find myself thinking 
things like, if I’d spent all that time 
playing sports, I could be the star 
of the football team. When I heard 
people talk about their childhood 
memories and childhood friends, it 
would trigger a depressive episode 
that lasted hours. My childhood 
memories placed me in a dark room 
in front of a screen for hours on end. 
“I will never have a childhood,” 
echoed through my skull.

I’d made some friends in middle 

school and tried to do more 
“normal” things like joining the 
track team or going to the mall, 
but with social skills built on the 
internet, face-to-face interaction 
felt like a losing battle in my 
head. I frantically advertised my 
dedication to fashion as my new-

found “cool” hobby. I needed a 
way to distinguish Dylan, the 
cool track runner fashionista, 
from Smallbones25, the internet-
addicted dweeb.

Naively I thought I was alone 

in living my life online. Even after 
I quit “RuneScape,” I just dumped 
the same amount of time into new 
outlets like playing “Minecraft” or 
making friends on anime fansites. 
I was caught somewhere between 
wishing I could leave it all behind to 
become a “cool kid” and wishing all 
those people I met on “RuneScape” 

or “Minecraft” or anime fansites 
could be real. It never clicked that 
there were real life people behind 
all those “RuneScape” avatars.

One day during a discussion in 

English class, I dropped an anime 
reference in front of the class. As 
soon as I let it slip I shut myself 
up — I’d accidentally let a little bit 
of Smallbones25 out. It didn’t seem 
like anybody noticed, though.

Somebody noticed.
Sitting alone at lunch always 

made me uncomfortable, so I 
would always eat in the library. 
The library was where the “nerds” 
hung out until fourth period. One 
of those nerds was in my English 
class. He saw through the fashion-
runner-boy and knew I was hiding 
Smallbones25 beneath. Gradually 
he lured me in and inducted me 
into his nerd circle. 

I’d made real friends in the 

last two years since I’d quit 
“RuneScape” and tried to start 
over, but for the first time in my 
life I had friends I could be myself 
around. They were different. They 
didn’t play sports. They didn’t talk 
to girls. They didn’t give a shit 
about my Air Jordans. But they 
watched videogamedunkey and 
played “Dungeons & Dragons” and 
they were always three steps ahead 
of the meme curve from constantly 
browsing 4chan. They too were 

born on the internet. They even 
played MMOs!

The library nerd circle developed 

into a close-knit crew that would be 
some of the only friends of mine to 
persist after high school. We played 
games online together, yeah, but we 
also did the same kinds of things I 
would have done with considerably 
more “normal” friends, like going 
to the movie theater or talking 
about school. Something about the 
backdrop of a shared childhood 
spent in front of screens made 
those normal things feel so much 

more genuine, like our 
brains were all tuned to the 
same frequency.

A small part of me still 

feared “RuneScape” for a 
long time, but by the time 
college rolled around I was 
breathing nostalgia for it. 
Watching my friends play 
MMOs like “Path of Exile” 
or “Final Fantasy XIV” was 
encouraging. I finally had a 
reckoning with RuneScape 
when I logged into old 
school “RuneScape” for the 
first time in seven years, 
a perfect recreation of the 
game that first sucked 
me into the abyss back in 
2007. It wrapped me up in 

excitement just like it did when I 
was a kid, but in a new, healthier 
way. Old friends like noodleboy12 
and Vortex King were long gone, but 
new friends took their place. Most 
of the player base is also nostalgic 
adults, and reminiscing about a 
childhood built on “RuneScape” is 
a staple conversation in old school. 
Like me, many of them balanced 
school, work, hobbies and a social 
life. I spent a couple months in the 
summer getting my fill of nostalgia 
and then naturally drifted from 
the game when school came back 
around.

I still wish I went outside and 

talked to real people a lot more 
than I did when I was a kid, but I 
wouldn’t 
remove 
“RuneScape” 

from my life story. The game didn’t 
just take — it gave a lot back. It 
gave back in small ways, like all 
the weird quirks embedded in 
my personality. I have a knack 
for napkin math from always 
calculating my experience points 
and levels. I chatted so much on 
“RuneScape” that I learned to type 
fast — so absurdly fast that I’ve 
never met anyone faster. I also spent 
years accidentally spelling things 
in British English (“RuneScape” is 
a British game).

COURTESY OF DYLAN YONO

If I was molded 
by the internet, 
“RuneScape” was 
the pair of hands 
that shaped me.

Read more online at 

michigandaily.com