When I was in first grade, my favorite TV show was “Peppa Pig.” I watched an episode every day after school, after dinner and before I went to bed. I was entranced.
As the curtains unfolded during the opening of each episode and the characters were each introduced with a big snort, I would wait in anticipation for the camera to zoom in on the star of the show. As a second grader, I was embarrassed to watch such a “childlike” show, but the characters mesmerized me, and I loved the calming episodes that were easy for an 8-year-old to digest.
As I grew up, an increasing portion of my screen time was spent on games like “Roblox” or “Minecraft,” so I stopped watching the show.
However, when my older cousin visited my family in sixth grade, I was faced with a devastating truth. As he pulled out his phone from his pocket and pulled up a horrifying picture of a front-facing peppa pig, I stared back, speechless and full of terror.
“Isn’t this such a funny meme?” he innocently said, as my whole world came crashing down.
The innocent Peppa Pig, who I had left untouched within my nostalgic childhood, came back as the incarnation of a disgusting monster with four unbalanced eyes on its face. Avid Peppa Pig fans, in their earnesty to see Peppa Pig from an angle other than her side profile, had come across a traumatizing creepypasta.
In an attempt to rekindle my love for the poor pig, I opened YouTube again. I went to the episodes I had watched in my childhood and tried to erase the disgusting image from my head. Throughout the comments, however, were little voices like flies, who couldn’t stop talking about the demonic creature.
“Did you guys see Peppa Pig’s real face LOL,” they said.
I rewatched another Peppa Pig episode a month ago — and sure enough — the cursed image of four-eyed pig would not leave my mind. With her uneven eyes too far in the back of her head, I could not shake off a queasy feeling.
What disturbs me most about this meme, however, was the fact that Peppa Pig’s side profile was enough to instigate someone to conjure up a cursed image of her front profile. Peppa Pig’s target audience would be too young to edit the photo as accurately as the creator of the meme did, which means there must have been some sort of teen or grownup who was rewatching the show and decided to bring her two-dimensional model to 3-D life.
Instead of turning TV show characters from eight years ago into little demons, people should dilly dally with their tomfoolery elsewhere (my week, needless to say, was ruined).
