FrankerZ

About

FrankerZ is a dog face emoticon used to convey sarcasm or playfulness in chat rooms on the video game broadcasting site TwitchTV.^[13] The image is sometimes spammed in forums and chat rooms during raids, in a similar vein to both "desu" and "( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)" .

Origin

According to the now-defunct website TwitchTVFaces,^[8] the TwitchTV streamer Ernest Le^[6] would sometimes speak in a different voice while referring to himself as "Frankerz," which led a TwitchTV staff member to add the FrankerZ emoticon using a photograph of Le's dog.^[7][9] The earliest known mention of the dog face icon was featured in a blog post about TwitchTV emoticons by gamer Ashe Soriano^[10] on January 31st, 2012.

Spread

On October 11th, 2012, a Facebook^[4] page titled "FrankerZ" was launched. On October 30th, the domain for the website FrankerZ^[2] was registered, which displays a page announcing that the website will launch sometime in 2013 (shown below).

On November 28th, Soundcloud user MarkSoupial uploaded "Marathon Anthem 2012 (Apocalypse 2012 Edit),” which featured an electronic dance song accompanied by a vocal track repeating the phrase “FrankerZ” (shown below).

On January 5th, 2013, the /r/FrankerZ^[3] subreddit was created. On January 8th, a Pastebin^[14] page was created with an ASCII art rendition of the FrankerZ dog face (shown below).

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On January 31st, YTMND user devanwolf submitted a page titled "FrankerZ," which featured a tiled photograph of the FrankerZ dog accompanied by the "Marathon Anthem 2012" track. On March 15th, Redditor gamecubes submitted a screen capture^[11] from the Nintendo 64 game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with FrankerZ's face superimposed at the end of a tunnel (shown below).

On May 20th, League of Legends Forums^[12] member Darthdanimal started a thread titled “FrankerZ,” which linked to a page on the flash website TehUrn^[5] featuring two photographs of the FrankerZ dog accompanied by the “Marathon Anthem 2012” audio track. On March 24th, Urban Dictionary^[1] user MHFsilver submitted an entry for “FrankerZ,” pointing to its widespread usage on TwitchTV.\

Frankie's Death

On July 31st, 2018, Twitter user @MrErnestLe^[16] tweeted a photo of Frankie along with an announcement that he passed away earlier that morning (shown below). Within four days, the tweet gained over 21,000 likes and 4,300 retweets.

That day, the official @Twitch account published a tweet in memory of Frankie, which gathered upwards of 81,000 likes and 18,300 retweets in four days (shown below). In the coming days, usage of the FrankerZ emote rose considerably in the coming days, peaking at 185,625 on August 1st according to TwitchEmotes^[18] (shown below, right).

Notable Examples

On Tumblr, photoshopped images featuring the FrankerZ dog’s head are often posted under the tag “#frankerz.”^[15]

Search Interest

External References