PepeW / PepeWeird

About

PepeW or PepeWeird is an emote that is highly popular in Twitch chats, often said when something in the stream is highly unusual. The emote is notable for not being one that originated on the platform, instead coming from a 4chan post from 2015.

Origin

The first instance of the meme comes from the /tv/ board on 4chan, where it was uploaded by an anon^[5] on July 6th, 2014, in regards to a sex scene being featured in the first episode of a TV show pilot (shown below).

Two years later, on September 13th, 2015, an anon on 4Chan posted a Greentext Story in which a bait and switch occurs, with the story supposedly being about friends playing Dota with some girls but it ends up being a fake story with the punchline being the music video DOTA by Swedish musician Basshunter (shown below).

Spread

With the advent of Twitch culture, and emotes being used in chat a lot, PepeWeird was selected as an emote to get used in a lot of chats, with other streamers either creating their own version or having petitions on their subreddit to add the original Pepew. This original PepeW was added to the emotes section of the Twitch-accompanying site BetterTTV^[1] by CongoBongoBongo^[2] on November 19th, 2018 (shown below).

Over the years, various other versions of PepeW were made and uploaded to another Twitch Emote website, FrankerFaceZ^[3] having a Santa themed PepeW^[4] added to it on November 8th, 2020, which is currently used in 35 sets on Twitch, but sees much greater usage around the holiday times (shown below).

Templates

Search Interest

External References