Raise your hand if you’re familiar with the term “Brogre.”
Nearly a decade after its release, Dreamworks launched the official Shrek Facebook page. Cute and innocent enough.
But they probably didn’t realize there was already a huge Shrek fan community online. Known as “Brogres,” this term is probably a parody of the word “brony” which itself refers to adult, male, My Little Pony fans.
Urban Dictionary describes it as someone who is slightly too obsessed with 2001’s most famous swamp-dwelling onion-lover, Shrek. In the early 2010s, the surprisingly large Brogre community created a surprisingly large amount of surprisingly varied Shrek content. They’d been making it seemingly all along, and a lot of it on 4chan.
Into that mire in 2013, was posted an equally dark and twisted story intimately describing both worship of and assault by the titular ogre.
The following month, two YouTubers, SgtSnuggleButt, and CatalystEXE both posted video versions of the story, each one resulting in hundreds of thousands of views.
A few months after the original 4chan post, a follow-up was posted, this time even more violent and over the top.
This allowed for the creation of a whole new subgenre of more visual spin-off memes – the operative phrase being “Shrek is Love, Shrek is Life.”
It became such a thing, that one user even posted to the 4chan subreddit, an image of Shrek is Love Shrek is Life graffiti on the wall of a school library.
So, that takes care of Shrek is Love Shrek is Life. Often over-the-top for its own sake, it’s another instance of sometimes genuine adoration of Shrek, sometimes mocking of the Brogres, and sometimes just taking advantage of the hype.
But what if you’re actually team Farquaad? Well, there are memes for that too – several.
There’s Lord Farquaad Pointing, which originated on Reddit/r/meirl in a self-deprecating way,
but later evolved to be used simply to make fun of anything you want. And, there’s “Some of You May Die,” which began life as a 9Gag post, and later became an easy way to call out the callousness and lack of empathy for a situation, person, or group.
But maybe the most famous one is known as Lord Faarquad E.
This one started out as a Twitter post, which combined an image of gamer and YouTube celebrity Markiplier with a still from Shrek. But it’s now more commonly known as a version that superimposed that image onto Mark Zuckerburg’s body – from a photo taken of a congressional hearing in 2018. It’s been used as an example of weird, almost abstract millennial humor.
These are just some of the highlights.
Honorable mentions would have to go to “Shrekd,”
“Shrek Star,” and many more.
Meme culture often turns real moments and real people into cartoons, so it’s fitting that a movie so full of caricatures would prove to be such a breeding ground for them. Shrek itself has staying power because there’s so much to unpack. Onions have layers, ogres have layers, and so does this fandom.
