Pepega, PepeHands and PepeLaugh: What Twitch's Pepe Emotes Mean

Where Pepega came from

Pepega is young for a Pepe. Know Your Meme traces the first known use to a Discord conversation on April 8, 2018, where the user adew posted it — the name appears to come from a mistyped emote code. adew's upload went onto FrankerFaceZ and BetterTTV the same day, and that FrankerFaceZ copy now sits in about 153,000 emote sets.

It reached a wide Twitch audience after it was added to Forsen's chat on September 13, 2018; Know Your Meme records the community spamming it, partly in protest at the addition. Within weeks came the "FOR SAN" joke: a horn-wielding Pepega yelling the streamer's name in a silly voice.

In use it means "that was dumb", aimed at a bad play, a bad plan or a confidently wrong take. Streamers get it too, and so does chat itself.

PepeHands and PepeLaugh

PepeHands is a crying Pepe holding its hands up toward the sky. The user OinkerBob uploaded it to FrankerFaceZ on September 18, 2016, and it spread through Forsen's community the following year. It is the heavy end of the sad scale — farewells, heartbreak, a final lost — with Sadge covering everyday disappointment.

PepeLaugh is Pepe grinning with tears in its eyes, and it is the most knowing emote in the family. According to Know Your Meme the drawing surfaced on 4chan in August 2014 and reached FrankerFaceZ in November 2015. Chat pairs it with "here it comes" or "HE DOESN'T KNOW" — laughter at a disaster the streamer has not seen coming yet.

Chat and search disagree about which one matters. Over the tracked week, PepeLaugh was typed about 7 times as often as Pepega. Yet Ahrefs estimates about 9,100 monthly US searches for "pepega" against about 1,000 for "pepelaugh" — people look up the frog they cannot read, not the one they can.

The Pepe the Frog backstory

Pepe was created by cartoonist Matt Furie as a laid-back character in his comic Boy's Club, which began in 2005. Over the following years he became a staple internet reaction image — the "feels bad man" sad frog dates to a 4chan thread from January 2009 — and Twitch's emote culture grew straight out of that meme culture.

In 2016 a subset of users turned Pepe into a vehicle for racist and antisemitic imagery, and in September 2016 the Anti-Defamation League added the character to its hate symbol database. The ADL's own entry says most uses of Pepe are not bigoted and never were, and that context decides whether a given image is hateful.

Furie objected to the co-option. He symbolically killed Pepe off in a one-page strip for Free Comic Book Day in May 2017, and later enforced his copyright: in June 2019 Infowars agreed to pay him $15,000 to settle a lawsuit over a poster that used the character. On Twitch, Pepega, PepeHands and the rest are the ordinary kind of Pepe — reaction faces for stupidity, sadness and nerves.

Why Twitch has no native Pepe emotes

Twitch has not published a rule that names Pepe, and we could not find a Twitch statement about the character. Its emote guidelines settle the question anyway: you may only upload emotes you hold all the necessary rights to, and another person's artwork is listed among the things you cannot use without permission. Pepe is Furie's copyrighted character.

The same guidelines ban hateful symbols and imagery, and Twitch's help center notes that subscriber emotes work across the whole site, so an in-joke that is harmless inside one community gets judged by how it reads everywhere else. A Pepe upload runs into the rights rule before that question even comes up.

The result is that the entire family — Pepega, PepeHands, PepeLaugh, monkaS, Sadge, the Peepos — lives on BetterTTV, FrankerFaceZ and 7TV. BetterTTV even ships a few Pepes, including FeelsBadMan and monkaS, in its global set. 7TV also works on Kick, whose own native emotes are a different set, covered in our Kick emotes guide.

Is Pepega offensive?

To some viewers, yes. Know Your Meme notes that Pepega is commonly typed alongside a slur for people with intellectual disabilities, and some viewers treat the emote itself as a stand-in for that word — a way to call someone that without typing it. Others use it purely as "dumb play" with no such intent. Both readings are live in chat today.

Because Pepega is not a native Twitch emote, whether it appears in your chat is your call. Leave it out of your channel's 7TV, BetterTTV or FrankerFaceZ set if you would rather not host it, and add Pepega to Blocked Terms if you want the word gone — Twitch shows blocked words as *** whether or not the viewer has an extension. For laughing at a bad play without the baggage, LUL and KEKW do the job.

How Pepega Is Used in Chat

• Pepega Clap

  A player walks into the same trap for the third time in a row.

• PepeLaugh HE DOESN'T KNOW

  Chat can see the enemy waiting behind the door; the streamer cannot.

• "I don't need the tutorial" PepeLaugh

  Said ten seconds before the streamer needs the tutorial.

• PepeHands last stream of the season

  A long-running series ends and chat gets sentimental.

Variants and Related Emotes