PepePls

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About

PepePls is an animated BetterTTV extension Twitch emote of Pepe the Frog dancing by turning left and right and moving its arms in a semicircular motion. In the years since its origin in 2015, it has become an important inside joke for members of the xQc fandom, among other prominent Twitch streamers.

Origin

On June 23rd, 2015, BetterTTV user EmJayKae uploaded an emoji of dancing Pepe the Frog titled PepePls (shown below).^[1] It was added to the BetterTTV Twitch keyboard.

Spread

Period of Limited Use

From 2015 to 2019, the reaction emote saw limited use. While it was a part of the BetterTTV keyboard, it never became a Global Emote.^[6] Community wiki streamsentials.com records PepePls but notes that it "never gained any traction to become popular" and suggests the reason for that is because there are already a lot of Pepe reacts, which do the same job, as well as the many other preexisting dancing reacts.

Association with xQc Community

Music videos featuring the Twitch emote of a dancing Pepe circulated widely on YouTube in the summer of 2019. For example, user ongakuu uploaded a video of dancing Pepe on May 19th, 2019 (seen below) which earned over 1.09 million views in three years.^[2] The video was set to Fox Stevenson's song "Out of my Head."

Many of the summer 2019 videos using the PepePls react set to various extracts of music made reference to Twitch streamer xQc and his community, often featuring images of xQc along with the Pepes. Based on posts and memes on the xQc fan subreddit, /r/xqcow, it appears that posting PepePls in chat became something of a unifying practice for fans, and the react a kind of mascot. One user, /u/Lw_flower, went so far as to make fan art of the PepePls react, posting an image (seen below) on August 5th, 2020 with the title "I really like when chat is dancing PepePls" which received over 1,000 upvotes.^[4]

PepePls, like many memes in the overall Pepelore tradition, is often used in a trolling context. For example, on a May 16th, 2022 stream by xQc, the streamer's chat was inundated with PepePls reacts and the sound "uu RR" spammed by watchers of the stream for several minutes, possibly disrupting his gameplay (seen below).^[3]

[This video has been removed]