Apu Apustaja

About

Apu Apustaja ("Help Helper" in English) is a poorly drawn variation of Pepe the Frog created in the style of Spurdo Spärde. While originally popularized on the Finnish image board Ylilauta, the character is also frequently posted on 4chan where he is referred to as "Helper."

Origin

Apu is originated from Frope, a cute frog that was drawn by Jerry Saltz, a man born in the Netherlands in the 1920s.

Spread

On January 14th, 2016, the "Apu Apustaja" Facebook page was launched. On March 25th, an anonymous 4chan user submitted the Apu Apustaja version of Pepe captioned with a misspelled sentence about a "food help helper" to the /b/ (random) board. The following day, a similar thread was submitted to /b/ in which the character complains that his "food help helper" was missing.

On April 19th, a thread featuring various illustrations of the character was submitted to the /int/ (international) board. On October 2nd, 2016, an illustration of the character was submitted alongside Pepe the Frog–themed parody lyrics to 4chan. The following day, a screenshot of the post reached the front page of the /r/4chan subreddit. Apustaja has since become one of the most popular Pepe variants and is widespread. The Apustaja subreddit has over 12K members as of late May of 2022.