Spurdo

Spurdo (or Spurdo Spärde) is the satiric Finnish recreation of the pre-existing meme Pedobear.

The drawn character is purposefully illustrated to be a bad knockoff version of the original Pedobear.

Initially it was used to mock certain members of Finnish internet communities, but over the time it has gained its own lore and fandom, as well as international recognition.

The first use of the meme leads back to 2009, when the administrator of the Finnish website Kuvalauta, called Jonneweb, posted his own poorly designed hand-drawing of Pedobear.

The reason behind this was that at the time, many new members started to submit unoriginal content that stood in relation with the Pedobear meme to the site. The aim of using Spurdo was to caricature these tendencies of the youngsters.

Spurdo was initially an internal gag in the Kuvalauta community, eventually shifting to the also Finnish site Narunappula in 2011.

There, the character was implemented into various MS Paint comics and has built several characteristics, like poor grammar, consuming energy drinks all the time, and so on. These characteristics were also meant to mock young people on the internet for their behaviours.

From 2012, Spurdo started to spread outside of exclusively Finnish communities. International imageboards like 4chan began to recognize it as a new potential viral meme format.

Some claim that Spurdo Spärde is in fact the predecessor of the even more famous web-comic series called Dolan, another MS Paint themed meme format that mocks the Disney character Donald Duck among many others.

• Buzzfeednews.com – How A Leftist Finnish Meme Became A White Supremacist Comic Strip
• Betterttv.com – Spurdo
• Meemi.info (finnish) – Spurdo Spärde