thearchivist.funPepe and the instability of a shared symbol
A comic character acquired incompatible meanings as different communities adapted it.
Context and provenance
Matt Furie created Pepe as a character in Boy's Club in 2005. Online users later adapted the frog into reaction images expressing happiness, sadness, smugness, and other feelings. Widespread reuse made the character recognizable outside the original comic, but it also reduced the creator's control over its associations. During the 2016 United States election period, white supremacist and other far-right users circulated hateful versions, while many unrelated uses remained non-bigoted. Furie attempted to reclaim the character's positive associations. An archive should therefore distinguish a particular image and its context from blanket assumptions about every appearance of the frog. The history concerns competing acts of appropriation, not one stable universal meaning.
Why it matters
Symbols can accumulate incompatible histories. Interpreting an instance requires attention to accompanying text, community, and setting; recognizing the character alone is insufficient to determine what a particular user intends to communicate.