Spurdo Spärde

About

Spurdo Spärde is a poorly drawn character based on the sprite image of Pedobear. It was originally conceived in the Finnish imageboard Kuvalauta to mock the newcomers who often flooded the site with hackneyed reposts, one of the main materials being images of Pedobear. The character is coarsely drawn on purpose and accompanied by captions that are misspelled and stylized in all cap.

Origin

The meme was born in late 2008 when an administrator of the Finnish gaming forum Jonneweb^[7] posted several links redirecting to the Finnish imageboard Kuvalauta. Due to Jonneweb’s reputation as an online hub for (pre)teenagers, some members of Kuvalauta became concerned that the imageboard would be overrun with unoriginal content by an influx of newcomers, a phenomenon commonly known as “newfaggotry” on the English-speaking web. The Jonneweb administrator referred to Kuvalauta as a “forum where you discuss about fish and bears”^[8] and thus the world-wide Pedo bear meme was considered to be posted particularly by Jonneweb users. The combination of pre-teenager Jonnes and the Pedo bear meme took a great evolution in 2009 when the users of Kuvalauta started to post ironically as Jonnes by capsing the text, representing as underage school kids and adding typoes on text^[1]. On December 6th, 2009, a thread^[2] with poorly drawn versions of Pedobear was posted onto Kuvalauta.

The thread^[2] struck a chord with the rest of the community and spawned a variety of drawings and photoshopped images based on the Pedobear character, which were meant to mock the unrefined sense of humor often associated with teenager on the Finnish web. The mutation progressed throughout the thread, with the character’s name changing from “Pedobear” to “budro poar” and “pedros spora” before becoming known as “Spurdo Sparde.”

Spread

The mutation of “Pedobear” continued to gain momentum as a popular inside joke on Kuvalauta, eventually earning the nickname “Spurdo Spärde.” By summer of 2011, the meme was evolved on Ylilauta^[4] (the successor of Kuvalauta) and later found its way on Naurunappula^[6], where people began making multi-pane cartoons featuring the character.^[5] Soon, Spurdo Spärde became an iconic representation of a stereotypical, underage “Jonne” who types in all-cap, uses poor grammar and drinks energy drinks all the time. The character has since evolved into a webcomic universe of Spurdo characters.

Spurdo also reached other non-Finnish imageboards like 4chan and Krautchan, where images of Spurdo characters have been spam-raided by Finnish internet users. On March 23rd, 2012, a sprite drawing of Spurdo Spärde took over the canvas of Drawball.

Spurdo bears many similarities to the character of Dolan, another “poorly drawn” fad based on the Disney character Donald Duck which also originated from Kuvalauta. Aside from the imperfectionist, MS Paint style of drawing, other common characteristics shared by Spurdo and Dolan include non-sequitur humor and grammatically faulty dialogues.