History
Origin
The character is rumored to have originated from the Finnish image board Ylilauta. While no archived threads exist, Google search records indicate the phrase "apu apustaja" began appearing on the site in January 2016.
Spread
On January 14th, 2016, the "Apu Apustaja" Facebook page was launched. On March 25th, an anonymous 4chan user submitted the Apu Apustaja version of Pepe captioned with a misspelled sentence about a "food help helper" to the /b/ (random) board. The following day, a similar thread was submitted to /b/ in which the character complains that his "food help helper" was missing. On April 19th, a thread featuring various illustrations of the character was submitted to the /int/ board. On October 2nd, 2016, an illustration of the character was submitted alongside Pepe the Frog-themed parody lyrics for the theme song from the science fiction television show Firefly to 4chan. The following day, a screenshot of the post reached the front page of the /r/4chan subreddit.
