Enter the Meme [Part 1 – General Peperon]

Dear colleagues and meme enthusiasts,

the MMMRKT team is proud to announce yet another great development that has taken place over the course of the last months.

As you might have noticed our scouts and affiliated traders have been going out of their way to find the freshest memes and have discovered some genuine masterpieces of meme art. In the last weeks, we got our hands on a absolutely fantasitc Pepe Tarot Set that previously has never been seen before. Thanks to our MMMRKT branch in Argentinia, led by our expert trader Joaquín we were able to buy it directly from the source.

And thats where the real news begin. As you have noticed the focus of the MMMRKT lies on trading memes. But as we have outlined in an article, written in 2015, regarding the globalisation of memetics, the source of the trade lies in the many men and women creating these awesome memes. We therefore have decided to create a new ongoing article series called “Enter the Meme”, where we want to put the spotlight on these individuals that do enrich our daily lives with their masterfully crafted memes and without whom traders like us would not exist.

You might have guessed it already, but thanks to Joaquín we were able to do an interview with the Argentinian lad who brought us the Pepe Tarot Set. Note that this interview has been conducted via phone and was, as per request of the interviewed, not recorded. Therefore the answers to the questions asked are based on notes that were taken during the interview and do not reflect the original tone of the interviewed but are a comprehensive summary of the key points that were mentioned.

Meet General Peperon from Buenos Aires

MMMRKT: So tell us something about yourself.

G.P.: My name is General Peperon, I am 24 years old and I live in Buenos Aires the capital city of Argentinia. I am studying biology at the moment and before that I have studied one and a half years of psychology.

MMMRKT: When did you first start to use the internet?

G.P.: It must have been around the year 2008 when I was 15. At that time I was mostly just browsing and enjoying the huge amount of content I suddenly had access to. It was a source of really cool information for me, because it was so unregulated back then. I actually learned english through the internet.

MMMRKT: What was the first meme you came into contact with?

G.P.: I think that would be some text based memes. Think of those chain letters you get sent and you have to forward to a certain amount of people so something good happens, or likewise, if you don’t, bad fate will come to you.

MMMRKT: What are your thoughts about Pepe?

G.P.: For me it is a symbol of an unsatisfied sector of society. The frog analogy has come up in various cultures in human history. Take the play “The Frogs” of Aristophanes for instance. In an infamous passage the frogs start to troll the god Dionysus himself.

Pepe the frog also represents chaos to me. Something that lives in all of us and cannot be subjugated. It looks so smug that you just cannot best it, no matter in what form it appears, it covers all facettes of life.

MMMRKT: When did you make your first meme?

G.P.: The first meme I made is the meme_magic.gif

It represents the chaos around Pepe. Chaos is often depicted with an 8-pointed arrow. The numbers represent the repeating digits which are the driver of this chaotic behaviour as seen on 4chan. Out of a sheer unlimted amount of content that is produced by humans all around the world, seemingly arbitrary numbers are validating or invalidating this content.

MMMRKT: Why did you decide to make the Tarot set?

G.P.: I was depressed at the time. A girl I loved turned out to be not compatible with me. I always have been a fan of pixel art, so in light of the circumstances I just thought to myself “fuck it” and started drawing a pixel art template for a Tarot card to cope with the feelings.
I locked myself into my autist cave and just drew the template in three days. Since I already had done a meme before and I was enchanted by the meme magic I was seeing all around the internet, I thought that Tarot in principle serves as a tool for illumination too, just like meme magic. Hence I decided that a Pepe would perfectly match this Tarot card template and it looked really funny. So I just went on and created the whole set of major arcana.

MMMRKT: What are your future plans regarding the creation of memes?

G.P.: It really humbles me how my artwork got accepted that quickly and is being spread around. It makes me proud, but on the other hand, it is one reason why I would like to stay anonymous. I just want the people to share the memes and not me. In memes we are all equal. I don’t want to have the memes linked with me as a person.

For the future I am planning on releasing the minor arcana of the Tarot set in the Pepe pixelart style, which consists of 56 cards that can be compared to a traditional set of spanish playing cards.

MMMRKT: Thanks for the interview!

G.P.: My pleasure.

Concluding this interview, we at MMMRKT hope you enjoyed the first part of our series giving some insights into the life of a meme craftsman that has brought us some very enjoyable memes and is one of the reasons why we do love our job so much. Keep an eye open for his skillfully crafted pixel art. When you see this Pepe, it might come from Buenos Aires.