Meme Archeology: OwO What’s This?
ErosBlog would not normally reference the recent bloody political assassination of a white Republican neofascist demagogue. (No, not this demagogue, a different one.) Political violence is emphatically the wrong lane for this publication.
However, this is 2025. Strange doings are afoot. Old patterns cannot hold. And thus it was that yesterday we were all treated to a spectacle of surpassing bizarreness. An alleged gunman was suddenly in custody, turned in by his own white Mormon Republican family, and the white Mormon Republican governor of Utah, one Spencer Cox, was on television with his big shaved block head, holding a press conference and attempting to read with a straight face a description of crime scene evidence so heavily-online, Governor Cox clearly had no idea what he was describing. Here he is, talking about meme language (whether he knew it or not) inscribed on the fatal spent shell casing from the crime scene:
Friends and gentle readers, I am an aging white man. Yes, I’ve been on the internet since the beginning. I’ve been a gamer, in varying degrees, for that whole time. Once upon a time I could claim without irony to be “aware of all internet traditions.” But I am slipping, in my dotage. When I saw the governor of Utah choke on an “OwO” I knew damned well we had fallen into deepest anime/gamer/4chan meme hell. Furthermore, since there was a man dead in a morgue in Utah somewhere, I figured groypers might be involved. But I didn’t recognize the precise meme involved.
For purposes of this post, I’m going to stay away from the politics, and from the other memes referenced on the other ammunition found at the scene. This particular bulges/OwO meme has a precise, well-known origin. Here it is:
Know Your Meme credits this cartoon to Imgur user MinotaurusPro, dates it to 2015, and describes it as:
A meme depicting two furries roleplaying online. In the art, one of the furries writes to the other, “nuzzles u back and pounces on u and notices your buldge ‘OwO what’s this…?” In the case of the meme, “bulge” refers to noticing the outline of a man’s crotch. The meme is meant to make fun of furry roleplaying, including the language and typing quirks stereotypically attributed to roleplayers and furries. Notably, the meme uses the symbol “OwO,” which is an emoticon commonly used by furries to portray a cutesy surprised face, similar to “UwU.” It is also used outside the furry community on the internet, often ironically.
We should now spare a moment for compassion toward the governor of Utah, the FBI, and every member of the law enforcement community who has been forced to grapple and who is currently grappling with the irony-poisoned evidence surrounding this shooting investigation. They are a bunch of offline squares who are not equipped to find nuance in an online world that delights in hiding said nuance in a bewildering mix of ironic mashups and deliberate self-contradiction. They can’t fix any of that overnight. So they are lost without a map, and there is very little hope for them.
This post is for the rest of us, for whom hope remains. Let me help all of you avoid some of the wrong roads I have seen other commentators go down. For example, I’ve seen it said in many places that the reference is to the song Catty Girl by Apollo. Usually whoever makes this claim references one of the two hundred and thirty five thousand TikTok videos that use the song for a soundtrack. Give a listen:
The lyrics pretty clearly call back to the meme, as I think you’ll agree if you dip into that vast well of videos linked above.
Other wrong roads I’ve seen people go down include the assertion that use of this one meme indicates a strong or ironclad association with groypers or 4chan or furries or some other particular online tribe. That’s just not how heavily-online meme culture works. There’s memetic swapping and borrowing. You can’t say precisely just who someone is, by looking only at their memes of choice.
Finally, I’m going wrap up this post with a meme-literacy lesson on what is going on with “OwO” in the first place. It’s an old-fashioned chat emoji, like typing these characters to indicate shrugging: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But OwO is part of a whole family of anime-inflected chat emoji that invoke facial expressions, and often imply some verbal component, like simpering, that goes along with them. Here’s a handy graphic to some of the common ones:
With a look at this chart, you should start recognizing how all talk of the OwO in mass media that has recognized its meme origins at all, has been tone-deaf at best. Because the only anime-face emoji that’s known in western public culture tends to be “UwU” — which is not the same as OwO at all! UwU (pronounced “ooowoo”) is a sort of coy or submissive simper; OwO (pronounced almost like “oh-ho!”) is a sexually-agressive interested greeting. The facial expressions on the chart say it better than words do. But most media discussion since poor Governor Cox had to read out the letters yesterday has treated these two as if they were interchangeably the same. And they just are not.
I shall let Khan from TikTok take us out with a comprehensive video illustrating the differences, as properly used in human speech with appropriate facial expressions:
There shouldn’t be any further excuse for confusion on your part after all of this!
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