When Dota 2's premier tournament, The International, started on Monday night, the English-language broadcast featured an analyst desk full of experts. Among them was Croatian analyst Dominik "Lacoste" Stipic, who was wearing a Pepe the Frog pin. Considering that The International 2019 is being hosted in Shanghai, that pin is more important than you might think.
Pepe the Frog has a very complicated history. In America, and much of the English-language internet, he's gone from a harmless meme to a hate symbol and back — depending on whom you ask. In Hong Kong, his recent history has been just as complicated, albeit in a different direction. Over the last several months, Hong Kong protesters have adopted the meme as a symbol of resistance.
Many of the most active participants in the Hong Kong protests have been young people. As with young people in any other part of the world, they have an incredible fluency in memes.
They have adopted the frog as a symbol of protest. They're spray-painting Pepe's face on walls, and giving it new contexts in the messaging apps where the meme has always been popular. (It's worth mentioning here that Pepe has never had the same racist or anti-Semitic associations in Hong Kong that it has had in the West.) The protesters are also creating their own versions of Pepe, complete with the yellow hard hats that have also become symbols of their resistance movement.
Was Stipic wearing a Pepe pin in support of the Hong Kong protests?
Stipic hasn't commented on his Pepe the Frog pin. On the one hand, it's one of the most popular memes on Twitch and elsewhere online. On the other, he wore one of the most recognizable symbols of the Hong Kong protests live during an esports tournament in Shanghai. For what it's worth, Lacoste only had the pin on for one segment. When the stream came back to the desk, the Pepe pin was gone, replaced with a different one.
Will China crack down on Pepe and other memes?
China has a history of trying to stamp out memes that criticize its government.
The gaming space saw this firsthand earlier this year when a Pooh meme was discovered within the indie horror game Devotion, developed by the Taiwan-based studio Red Candle Games. The mocking meme, which unfavorably compares Chinese president Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh, is taken very seriously in China. Red Candle pulled the game from Steam after Chinese players review-bombed it; the country later revoked the business license of the game's publisher, Indievent.
And as several people have mentioned on the Hong Kong subreddit, Pepe isn't the only Dota 2-related meme popping up on The International broadcast. On the official English Twitch channel, many viewers have been spamming the phrase "free Hong Kong" in chat as well. According to the subreddit, this phrase seems to be fine, but viewers are reportedly being banned for using phrases such as Winnie the Pooh and Tiananmen Square.
