Expressions like “Arise Chickun” and “the Flappening” await any unsuspecting layman who decides to lurk r/Litecoin or another related Litecoin forum. Fans of the oldest Bitcoin alternative seem to have somewhat fowl tendencies. But why the love of poultry among enthusiasts of this cryptocurrency?
It seems that “Arise Chickun” predates Litecoin’s association with chickens. It was first coined in the third season premiere of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, an animated surreal humor show created for Adult Swim. The 2004 episode, titled “Video Ouija”, featured a séance ritual which used the phrase. Something about the ridiculous segment seemed to capture the imagination of the Internet.
And it all gained a new meaning in 2011, when fans of My Little Pony (known as the Brony fandom) rallied around the expression “Scootaloo is a chicken”, a gag originating from the first season of the show. When moderators on 4chan’s /b/ board started taking action against people spamming a related meme about the character Scootaloo, someone had the idea of Photoshopping a laser eye onto the pony and adding the words “ARISE CHICKUN”.
The joke caught on, and posters began using it to poke fun at mods. The result? The meme we now know, and might come to love with time.
But how did this meme make the jump from the Brony fandom to the crypto space? According to Reddit user u/Gristledorf, it happened during a price run-up of LTC from $2.80 to over $10. On BTC-e, a now-defunct cryptocurrency trading platform, users were apparently in a state of pure hysteria, spamming a multitude of puns and references adapted to Litecoin. Among them was “Arise Chickun”, which appears to have stood the test of time.
This sort of humor is appreciated even at the very top levels. Charlie Lee, the Litecoin founder himself, is the source of the joke “the Flappening”, a chicken-infused parody of “the Flippening“. While the market capitalization of Litecoin did exceed that of Bitcoin Cash by the end of 2017 as predicted by Lee, the two coins have since been neck-to-neck.
The whole thing is quite similar to the obsession of Robinhood retail investors with “chicken tendies”. For a community peckish for lighthearted fun, the absurd can be hilarious, and also quite delicious.
