You probably clicked this article to find out why I hate Moo Deng, the actual hippo. So to get this out of the way, no, I’m not deranged enough to hate an animal. But I do hate Moo Deng the viral phenomenon. If you do too, and you’re not sure why, you’ve come to the right place. You are valid and you are not alone.
To understand why this phenomenon activates the buzzkill instincts of those of us in the hater community (or just the hate-curious), we have to briefly dissect the narrative that brought Moo Deng, involuntarily, to our attention. Long story short: Not everyone finds Moo Deng all that cute, but because she’s a meme — and memes get seen by everyone — she’s overexposed.
Moo Deng exploded onto the internet during the first two weeks of September, achieving Category 5 mega-virality, and irritating some of us in the process. But this was only after a more moderate online fanbase was cultivated for her in early August by an astonishingly successful naming contest put on by the Thai zoo where Moo Deng lives in an enclosure for the amusement of paying customers. (Pygmy hippos come from Liberia and elsewhere in western Africa, not Thailand.)
Much of the fandom’s success seems to stem from a poster with the handle @sighyam, an X user and rabid Moo Deng stan who apparently knows Thai and English, and helped bring Moo Deng to the Anglosphere when she was still just a nameless baby animal in a zoo.
If Moo Deng doesn’t do it for you, or you have a general attitude of “most cute stuff is not for me but go with God if it works for you,” none of this really penetrated your social media timelines. That’s good! Everyone was happily consuming the content they enjoyed.
Something shifted, however, when two images of Moo Deng broke containment and Moo Deng legitimately became a meme. Mostly, it was the second of these two images:
The meme scholars at KnowYourMeme attribute Moo Deng’s success to this second photo, saying in one explainer video:
Photographs and videos of Moo instantly went viral, in particular this really cute image where she’s being sprayed with a water hose while looking mortified. That’s right, the reason this hippo is so viral is she looks visually perturbed, like she really doesn’t want to be sprayed with that beam of water.
As everyone knows, enormous volumes of cutesy-poo stuff circulates endlessly online in a benign way that doesn’t really merit criticism. Happily, all this content is corralled in the sections of social media where people enjoy it. Some of us mostly like to scowl and rub our chins when we scroll, and the algorithms seem to mostly understand this, and not bother us with things like baby animals. In the event that a cute animal materializes that we do like, the algorithms will clue into our “revealed preference” and adjust accordingly.
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Truly meme-able images, on the other hand, operate differently. They light up a different part of the brain than cute images, and that’s what happened here.
Moo Deng wasn’t just cute. She was also intriguing.
Why were people meme-ing Moo Deng? More to the point, why were they making her into art?
My own guess is that the answer is rooted in the pseudoscientific concept of “unconscious priming,” or responding to some stimulus in a way that is “primed” by a previous stimulus, without the person being cognizant of the connection.
What connection do I mean? Even though you’re not conscious of it, Moo Deng looks weirdly like “Chubby Bubbles Girl,” an ancient meme, probably from before you, the person reading this, were born.
If you were happily unaware of Moo Deng, and then the hose photo crept into your life, I suspect it unconsciously tapped into your memories of Chubby Bubbles Girl and her many meme adventures, adding a layer of fascination to what was otherwise just a wide-eyed, wet hippopotamus. That’s not to say a hippo actually looks like a little girl, but the leaning away, the stark white of the single wide eye, the splash of yellow in the Moo Deng photo, and the motion blur all render the two photos a matching pair, even if their subjects are not.
Credit: Meme image posted for comparison
Credit: Meme image posted for comparison
If you briefly raised an eyebrow at this image, and then went on with your day without joining the Moo Deng cult, Chubby Bubbles Girl may have been the reason. And even if you think I’m wrong about this part, you may still be asking yourself “why are we still somehow talking about this?” Memes have a mysterious form of cultural inertia.
The meme stage is where the Moo Deng phenomenon went incredibly right from the perspective of Khao Kheow Open Zoo, and incredibly wrong from the perspective of people who are immune to Moo Deng’s specific brand of cuteness. Moo Deng was suddenly a powerful tempest of content, and those of us who regard her the way Ben Wyatt on Parks and Recreation regards Li’l Sebastian suddenly had to deal with the existence of, for instance, a Moo Deng SNL sketch.
Some haters have tried to morally high-road the Moo Deng phenomenon and argue that Khao Kheow Open Zoo is an exceptionally cruel zoo. That theory is not currently supported by the facts. Assuming you have a baseline tolerance for the animal prisons we call “zoos,” this one is neither here nor there. If you care about animal welfare, Moo Deng is probably not where you should direct your energy.
The truth is that Moo Deng is perceived by many to be a very cute animal, which is fine. The internet has plenty of opt-outs for cute animal content. But due to an annoying accident of internet psychology, Moo Deng has become a meme, and there’s no opt-out for memes.
That sucks, but it will pass.