Rare Pepe

You might know Pepe the Frog from racist alt-right memes on the internet. Memes of Pepe killing jews or dressed as a klan member ruined the memory of what was originally just a regular web-comic character and the anti-defamation league labeled it a hate symbol. So I was surprised to see this on the subway.

Was this Pepe-toting Korean woman somehow a white nationalist? It didn't make sense. At first I thought it was a fluke and then I stumbled upon another rare Pepe, this one singing Karaoke. Is 4chan taking over Seoul's karaoke bars?

Confused, I did some research and discovered that in Asia, most people don't know that Pepe is a hate symbol. Instead, he's associated with the Hong Kong protests against Chinese authoritarianism. Why? The best explanation I can find is that someone used Pepe in some protest memes not knowing it's considered a hate symbol, and it got some modest popularity. People in the west started reporting on the use of a hate symbol in Hong Kong and protesters saw the media attention as beneficial, so they doubled down.

So Pepe has gotten a kind of redemption. He gets to live on in the east as a symbol of freedom rather than hate. Although after talking to a few Koreans who didn't seem to know anything about Pepe as a symbol, either for nationalists or for protestors, I think the main reason he's popular here in Seoul is that he's a cute frog.