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$DESU the first ever Meme Cult
In 2004, before Pepe and Wojak, before anyone talked about “meme magic,” there was Desu,a single word taken from the anime Rozen Maiden.
The character Suiseiseki ended her sentences with “desu,” a simple copula in Japanese. But on 4chan’s /a/ board, it became something else entirely. Users began spamming the word obsessively. Not once or twice, but thousands of times.
ASCII art of Suiseiseki became common. People made edits, videos, soundboards, and remixes.
It was one of the first examples of what would later be called a meme cult.
$DESU showed how spam, repetition, and shared absurdity could create real cultural momentum. It predated and arguably inspired many of the meme formats that came later: the worship of Pepe, the viral cycles of Wojak, the performative belief seen in tokens like $SPX, or the aesthetic systems of Milady.
