/lit/ - Literature

YES. This is the thread I was born to reply too.

I am both an expert on the subject of Pepe the Frog (my Rare Pepe folder has 3,483 unique image files, the largest collection I'm aware of) and a proud Nietzsche scholar who practices his noble philosophy each and every day. I am less familiar with Wojak, but he's in a lot of Pepe images and an inextricable part of the Pepe Mythos, so I can also talk about him to some extent.

There is much to speak of on the fascinating canon of ideas and tales that have grown around these archetypal figures. The changeable Pepe and the mayhaps more-sympathetic Wojak seem to live multiple lives in the images that feature them, and indeed some students of the topic have constructed branching timelines explaining the apparent differences in personality different images display. From the tender and homely to the terrifying and violent, the Pepe/Wojak Canon runs the gamut of human feeling, experience, and imagination. Like Apollo and Dionysus, they DO represent the ultimate conflict within all of our naturae. The war of passion and patience, of romance and reason!

Pepe can be gloomy one moment, and triumphantly caprine and homicidal the next... just as the rage of Dionysus lulls and perhaps even dips beneath the surface... the palette of his life is one of extremes, bright sharp hues and contrasts. He is the manic depressive genius, the visionary fool, the -up Clown Prince of the Zeitgeiststrang, au delà bonne / mauvais dichotomie. Oui oui, indomptable.

Wojak is the depressive to Pepe's manic case - the Sherlock to his Holmes, the Jekyll to his Hyde, the Luigi to his Mario. From the lows of misery, the heights of wisdom are available to him! But how they burden him! He is alone, a figure of sorrow acquainted with grief,
et non expergiscentur intus -- "consurgant intra me!" He is the Philosopher, the Systematizer, and, though we may protest, perhaps closer to our waking consciousness than any Pepe iteration. Nietzsche himself was Wojak incarnate.

Indeed, these are simply contemporary gods, a la Gaiman - Dionysus has been born again, and has brought the immortal Apollo with him.

We are all Pepe. We are all Wojak. For we are Human.