About

Apu Apustaja ("Help Helper" in English) is a poorly drawn variation of Pepe the Frog created in the style of Spurdo Spärde. While originally popularized on the Finnish image board Ylilauta, the character is also frequently posted on 4chan where he is referred to as "Helper."

Origin

The character is rumored to have originated from the Finnish image board Ylilauta. While no archived threads exist, Google search records indicate the phrase "apu apustaja" began appearing on the site in January 2016.^[5]

Spread

On January 14th, 2016, the "Apu Apustaja" Facebook page was launched.^[6] On March 25th, an anonymous 4chan user submitted the Apu Apustaja version of Pepe captioned with a misspelled sentence about a "food help helper" to the /b/ (random) board (shown below, left).^[1] The following day, a similar thread was submitted to /b/ in which the character complains that his "food help helper" was missing (shown below, right).^[2]

On April 19th, a thread featuring various illustrations of the character was submitted to the /int/^[4] (international) board (shown below, left). On October 2nd, 2016, an illustration of the character was submitted alongside Pepe the Frog-themed parody lyrics for the theme song from the science fiction television show Firefly to 4chan. The following day, a screenshot of the post reached the front page of the /r/4chan subreddit (shown below, right).^[3] Apustaja has since become one of the most popular Pepe variants and is widespread. The Apustaja subreddit has over 12K members^[7] as of late May of 2022.

Related memes

With time, variations of Apustaja would evolve over time such as Bobo the Bear bear to represent the bearish markets on the 4chan /biz/ board. One popular meme Apustaja is often paired with is Ashbie Moon which seems to be a parody of "The The Princess and the Frog". Kohler is an illustration of various other memes based on a smug Apustaja template.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References