MonkaS & MonkaW Explained: Decoding Twitch’s Most Nervous Emotes

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If you’ve ever stepped into a popular Twitch stream during a high-stakes match, you’ve likely seen the chat mutate from words into a wall of green, sweating frogs.

If you are new to the platform, this is confusing. Why is everyone posting a nervous cartoon frog? Is the streamer in trouble?

Welcome to the deep end of Twitch culture. You are seeing “MonkaS,” one of the most widely used emotes to convey tension, anxiety, and high-pressure situations. But it doesn’t stop there—there is a whole family of these emotes, including its loud cousin, MonkaW.

Here is a breakdown of what these emotes mean, where they came from, and why chat spams them during the most intense moments of a broadcast.

The Origin Story: Pepe and BTTV

First things first: You won’t find MonkaS in the standard Twitch emote menu.

MonkaS, like many of the most popular emotes on the platform (like PogChamp’s many variants or Pepega), is based on Pepe the Frog, a comic character created by Matt Furie that became an internet meme staple.

To see MonkaS in chat, you need browser extensions like BetterTTV (BTTV) or FrankerFaceZ (FFZ). These third-party tools allow streamers to upload custom emotes that their community can use, vastly expanding the visual vocabulary of Twitch chat.

MonkaS first appeared on 4chan around 2011 but was uploaded to BTTV in 2016, forever changing how chat reacts to pressure.

What Does MonkaS Mean?

Visual: A drawing of Pepe the Frog looking straight ahead with bulging eyes and beads of sweat pouring down his forehead.

Meaning: MonkaS is the universal Twitch symbol for anxiety, nervousness, or high-stakes tension.

It is used when the outcome of a situation is uncertain and the pressure is on. You will rarely see MonkaS used during casual gameplay. Instead, chat saves it for truly intense moments.

Common examples of MonkaS usage:

• When a streamer is the last player alive in a competitive shooter (like Valorant or CS:GO) and has to clutch the round against multiple enemies.
• When a speedrunner is on a world-record pace and approaching the hardest part of the game.
• When a streamer is about to open a high-value loot box or gamble a large amount of in-game currency.
• When the streamer is telling a risky story that might get them in trouble with Twitch Terms of Service (TOS).

What Does MonkaW Mean?

Visual: A highly zoomed-in version of MonkaS, focusing entirely on the sweaty forehead and terrified eyes.

Meaning: Panic. Sheer panic.

The “W” in Twitch emote variants usually stands for “Wide” or indicates a zoomed-in perspective. If MonkaS is nervousness, MonkaW is the alarm bell. It’s used when the situation has gone past tense and straight into terrifying or chaotic territory. It’s the visual equivalent of screaming.

You use MonkaW when the “intense moment” peaks—like when the streamer gets jump-scared in a horror game or immediately after they lose that crucial clutch round in heartbreaking fashion.

The Wider “Monka” Family

Twitch culture never settles on just one version of a meme. The “Monka” naming convention has spawned various other emotes to describe specific types of stress:

• monkaGIGA: A gigantic version of the sweating frog for overwhelming pressure.
• monkaHmm: Pepe thinking suspiciously, used when chat thinks the streamer is lying or something doesn’t add up.
• monkaTOS: Specific anxiety that the streamer is about to break Twitch rules and get banned.

Turning Intense Moments into Content

Chat uses MonkaS because they feel the tension radiating from the streamer. For a content creator, those high-pressure situations are gold mines. The moments that make chat sweat are usually the moments that make for viral clips on TikTok or YouTube Shorts.

But as a streamer, you might be live for eight hours. Finding those 30 seconds of peak intensity where you screamed, clutched a round, or got jump-scared can take hours of re-watching your own VODs.

This is where Eklipse steps in.

Eklipse AI is designed to recognize the same things chat recognizes. Our AI scans your stream VODs and identifies intense audio cues—sudden spikes in volume, shouting, high-action game sounds, or terrified screams during a horror playthrough.

Just as chat instinctively spams MonkaW when things get crazy, Eklipse automatically detects those intense moments and clips them for you, ready to be edited into vertical format and shared instantly.

Don’t let your best MonkaS moments disappear into the VOD abyss. Let Eklipse find them for you.