Weird But Cool – Feels Good Man The Redemption And Saving Pepe The Frog

Feels Good Man is a film by artist Matt Furie a cartoonist who created the character Pepe the frog and reclaiming the character he created from the alt right.

ABOUT FEELS GOOD MAN

Feels Good Man is a rare film that manages to be harrowing on multiple, completely different wavelengths. For “normies” (to use the lingo of the kind of people profiled by the documentary), there’s the horror of seeing the machinations of the internet‘s far right in action, and being introduced to its utterly absurd vagaries and subcultures. You’re entering the land of 4chan, bizarre racist symbolism, and most pertinently, Pepe the Frog. For a certain subset of very online viewers (such as your humble critic), there’s the added mortification of already knowing how all this works. Watching this movie with such context evokes the same feeling as having to sit down and explain “Gamergate” to someone not in the know. “God, why am I already familiar with all this? What am I doing with my life?” And that’s all before they get to the Pepe cryptocurrency.

Cartoonist Matt Furie seems a pleasant fellow, so it’s deeply unfortunate that one of his creations became a preeminent symbol of modern fascism through the (only partly explicable) alchemy of the internet. He invented Pepe in 2005 for his zine Boys Club, a comic about anthropomorphic creatures living in slacker squalor. In his debut, the character urinates by pulling his pants all the way down, explaining that it “feels good man.” This apparently is what endeared him to the users of 4chan, which started Pepe along the road to becoming one of the notorious forum’s most ubiquitous memes, and eventually led to him being used in all manner of awful imagery by members of the so-called “alt-right.”