How Pepehands Emoticons Are Spreading Across The Internet

CONTENT

Overview

PepeHands is a humorous picture of the famous Pepe the Frog character from Disney. He has big, red eyes and his ears are always perkier than his nose. His arms raise up as if making a shield on his face and often he’s frowning. Both the word and his pose are commonly in use as a word for depression or sadness. An example of his use is when a cheerleader is upset about something in their life.

The main character of the book, Pepe, is a frog that is the owner of a pet shop. Every day he gets into trouble and when the customers come, he resists them all the way. One day a boy named Boots decides to come in and see what all the commotion is about. The customer that Boots bumps into is Sauce, and he promptly sells pepehands to him.

It seems that sauce enjoys selling pepehands emotes, as he offers some to a happy frog in the background while talking to a customer. He sells them to her for twenty dollars each, and she tells her friends, and so the story goes. Shortly thereafter, her best friend, Flopsy, comes to town and realizes that sauce has a lot of business. Together they help Pepe and his friends defeat the evil Napoleon.

Pepehands Widely Represent Sadness and Banishment

The frog family has been widelyin use to represent sadness and to represent banishment. This may be the reason that the emoticons “pepes”, (the word describing pepehands) and ” twitch”, (frequently used as channel names) have appeared on various websites associated with various gaming communities and discussion boards. Many of these emoticons have also become quite common on chat windows across various platforms. For example, if you use the chat icon ” emoticon “(the square character equivalent of the “pepe” emoticon) at the top of a message, it will disappear when the message is closed.

The Emoticons on Social Networking Channels

Channels allow using the emoticons freely

Today’s internet culture and usage is heavily dependent on various social networking channels, including the MySpace network and Facebook. These sites have become places where people meet to talk about things that interest them, talk about their families, discuss their pets, discuss politics, discuss practically anything that crosses their minds. In some ways, this is similar to networking, except that instead of being face to face with your fellow members, you are dealing with typed text messages. However, unlike networking, pepehands are often in use to represent something as banal as sadness. For example, one user recently commented on a news story that there are some people who believe that President Obama is a communist: “Look at all those pepehands at the Obama inauguration. Disgusting people, what do they say?”

Channels limit or ban using the emoticons

There has been an ongoing debate about whether or not users should feel “othered” or “stuck” by the fact that they can’t chat freely or form conversations with others while using emoticons like “pepehands.” Some argue that such restrictions limit free speech. Others think that freedom of expression is too important to allow someone to take a break from reading or using the keyboard to type out a comment on a news article or to post a status update. Some of these emoticons, such as the smiling face with eyes or the saying “pepe hands” are so common that they are practically wallpaper. Therefore, it would seem like banning all emoticons in the future would severely limit Internet use.

Although there is some argument over the need for strict rules in the use of emoticons, at least one major business website, LinkedIn, allows its users to set their personal limits on how much they will allow others to chat in certain areas. Another major company, Yahoo! also has chat guidelines that state that using certain emoticons or chat messages will result in users being banned. In addition to these major companies, dozens of smaller sites use emoticons and other icons in their messaging systems; therefore, it would be difficult for businesses to monitor which messages and icons are allowed and which are banned. Pepehands, however, is not one of those smaller messaging systems and its usage in free online chat rooms does not violate any of these strictures.

How Pepehands Growing in Popularity

Pepehands started growing in popularity shortly after its inception, but its real boost came when adding it to the emoticons list on Facebook. At first, its presence on Facebook was fairly minimal; however, it began gaining in popularity as more people started posting their reactions to stories or videos using emoticons. Now, even if you don’t have a Facebook account, you probably have heard of Pepehands and other popular emoticons. It has become so popular that even people who don’t use Facebook send messages using these emoticons; thus, it is only a matter of time before it overtakes MSN’s chat emoticons as the most widely used form of communication on the web. It is funny to think how fast internet usage expands when emoticons become universally accepted as harmless and enjoyable.