About
Pet the X refers to a series of wholesome snowclone video memes featuring a large, disembodied hand petting various characters to make them happy. Each video begins by showing an image of a sad character. The video then cuts to a disembodied hand. The hand inches closer to the character and pets it vigorously, changing the character’s expression from sad to happy. In some instances the hand doesn’t pet the character at all, instead bait and switching the audience by performing an unexpected and often violent action. These memes are commonly set to Ending Theme from Super Mario World.
Origin
In early 2020, a trend called frogposting took off on Instagram, spreading to other social media platforms. As a result, on February 18th, content creator DitzyFlama posted a sped-up GIF of a person petting a frog to his Twitter feed. The post gained over 14.6 thousand likes and retweets within seven months. This GIF was repurposed and reuploaded by many users, starting the Mmmm Myes Pet Froge meme, and shortly after PETTHE Emotes on Twitch.
On July 26th, YouTuber manwel super uploaded a video titled “pet the doge” to his YouTube page. The video depicts a Shiba Inu losing his cowboy hat, causing him to cry. The same disembodied hand from DitzyFlama’s frog petting GIF flies onto the screen and pets the dog, making him happy (shown below). The video is set to the song Buttercup by MixAndMash. It garnered over 920,000 views and 83,000 likes in under two months.
Spread
On July 27th, 2020, Instagram user nitro.if uploaded a video captioned, “Me @ my homies when they’re sad.” The video features the same disembodied hand from manwel super’s video petting a sad Peepo, who starts smiling and glowing as the hand pets him. On the same day, nitro.if uploaded the video to their YouTube page, gaining over 1.6 million views and 157,000 likes in under two months (shown below). This video set the trend of using Ending Theme from Super Mario World as background music.
On August 19th, YouTuber SilentManJoe uploaded a video titled PET THE SPY to his YouTube channel. In this video, it appears as if a disembodied hand is going to pet the Spy from Team Fortress 2. Instead, the hand crushes the Spy, resulting in a splatter of blood (shown below). The video garnered over 375,000 views in under one month. It is the first instance of a bait and switch Pet the X variant, where something unexpected happens instead of or after the petting.
On September 12th, YouTuber bearbubb uploaded PET THE RED to his YouTube channel, continuing the less wholesome bait and switch trend. In this video, a red crewmate from Among Us is sliced in half after being pet. The video gained over 197,000 views in four days. Users continue to make both wholesome and bait and switch variants of the meme.
Various Examples
Pet the X / PETTHE Emotes
The original frog petting GIF inspired a series of Twitch emotes in which the frog in the “pet the frog” GIF is replaced by various subjects. On May 16th, 2020, user of the Twitch emote extension BetterTTV (BTTV) flammel_xd created two emotes in the PETTHE format. The first was PETTHEPEEPO featuring the peepoHappy emote (shown below, left) and the second was PETTHECUTIE which features the FaceFrankerZ emote Ayaya. Six weeks after being posting, PETTHEPEEPO became used on over 3,300 Twitch channels, making it the most successful PETTHE variant.
Following PETTHEPEEPO, people began creating PETTHE emotes in response to various Twitch streamers accepting new channel emotes. On May 23rd, BTTV user ayyybubu uploaded a variant called “PETTHEMANLET” with Twitch streamer Nymn being petted. On the 27th, Twitch streamer GreekGodx uploaded “PETTHEGREKLER” to BTTV for his channel. On May 28th, BTTV user senboni uploaded “PETTHESCHNOZER” which showed the nose of streamer xQc’s being petted. Senboni submitted it to xQc’s subreddit on the same day and it received almost 3,000 upvotes within a month. xQc accepted the emote the next day.
As of June 28th, 2020, over 400 PETTHE emotes have been uploaded to BTTV.
Search Interest
Know Your Meme Store
External References
Source: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pet-the-x