Pou arrived as a mobile virtual pet game in 2012, where players fed, washed and played with the brown alien-like character and heard its squeaky vocal reactions. Clips of those noises later spread on TikTok and YouTube as standalone reaction sounds, often used alongside bruh for short comic pain or disgust. The hurt-style ugh became a shortcut for melodramatic suffering because almost everyone recognises Pou's voice from childhood phones, and creators still reuse it when a real scream would feel too serious for the joke.