What I learned from Moo Deng's spiral from delightful to terrifying

I sent my first Moo Deng meme on September 3rd at 10:15pm via Instagram, in front of the Thai pygmy baby Hippo has taken the world by storm (which means I am better and more worldly than you).

It started innocently enough, with reposts from the Khao Kheow Open Zoo's X-account, but quickly escalated until my colleagues started sending me tweets telling me to make a brisket out of the poor thing. How exactly Moo Deng – which means “springy pork” in Thai – went from cute to edible is beyond me, but perhaps it has something to do with the “cuteness aggression” phenomenon, where my desire to eat the hippo is born out of love rather than malice (or hunger). That being said, Khao Kheow Open Zoo is now concerned about Moo Deng's safety and restricts visiting hours to weekends, so perhaps the calls to eat Moo Deng are indeed malicious.

The point is, I sent this out of love to my better half, and Moo Deng has now gone through the spiraling stages of internet fame. This pattern holds true for Brat Summer, which began with green memes circulating among Charli XCX's queer fanbase and ended with NATO posting “peace” in Brat green and Kamala Harris' campaign adopting the color scheme as its own. Once a rather obscure hippo, Moo Deng has already become the face of Pop-Tarts and Sephora Thailand, and appears in a network of influencer tutorials. Social media marketing seems to have its finger on the cultural pulse more than ever, accelerating the timeline between cool and corporate.

Here's my account of Moo Deng's evolution from sleepy, sweet (“ew,” if you will) to shamelessly loud guy and the perfect main dish for your next neighborhood barbecue.

3 September: This is the first Moo Deng meme I sent. It bought me many hours of my early 20s, algorithm-wise. But as you can see, my intentions were pure in the beginning.

11 September: Moo Deng gets a Sephora ad, and the part of me that wishes I had been discovered in a mall as a kid is furious. This post is perhaps the best summary of the heyday of Moo Deng's sweet era, when beauty influencers welcomed the hippo into the digital celebrity canon.

Also September 11th: While at this stage of the game Moo Deng's primary appeal was her cuteness, her tendency to screech to thwart her keepers' attempts to control her movements reflected another zeitgeist phenomenon: female rage.

17 September: I would also classify this Moo Deng cake tutorial as part of the Moo Deng Cute Era. However, this is where social media users start making comparisons between the hippo and edible products. Perhaps this post marks the turning point from Moo Deng's popularity as a beauty icon to a potential food.

18 September: This X user's (formerly Twitter) mother thought Moo Deng looked like the sweet, round South Indian dessert Ragi Mudde – a mistake that can easily be made, but the consequences are that her comparisons to delicious treats are even harder to dismiss:

18 September: X-user @Bigcontentguy posts the most extreme call to take down Moo Deng that I've ever seen. His threat concerns side dishes, specifically “some steamed rice, maybe some okra and glazed carrots.” Welcome to edgelord hell.

19 September: Flash tattoos of Moo Deng are popping up and doing quite well on Instagram. One image in particular stands out to me: Moo Deng chewing on a severed human leg. To me, this design and its popularity signals a changing cultural attitude towards Moo Deng, perhaps to justify a collective hunger induced by cuteness aggression:

19 September: This meme walks a fine line between a celebration of the aforementioned female rage – innocent enough and even empowering – and a denigration of the big bread. She's angry, she's cute, she's delicious?

19 September: Feminism takes over Moo Deng.

20 September: Makeup artist Mei Pang continues to create the iconic look of the hungry hippo. As one commenter puts it, “Moisturized and carefree, Moo Deng is THE ultimate beauty queen.”