Story time. I think it's telling that the term appeared after the pedes term vanished.
Back in like 2014-2016 around that time, I recall reddit banning a bunch of subreddits like /r/niggers, which caused a lot of them to go to voat.co. I had wandered into that site during my lolbertarian phase and watching them ban everything pro-assange. Anyways, I recall a new subreddit popping up around the time ShareBlue was being discovered shilling on places like 4chan and voat. It was a pro-trump subreddit called the pedes as in the centipedes, which posted really shitty pro trump memes in a very controlled opposition type of way. I can't prove it but I had a feeling it was ShareBlue (especially since tons of other pro trump things were being banned). Everyone basically told them they sounded retarded and the term pedes sounded like pedophile. Shortly afterwards, the term Groyper appeared after Nick Fuentes started doing his thing, and so his followers and America First kids started to call themselves Groypers. Which I thought sounded like groping / Gay rapers which seems fitting for Nick Fuentes. Perhaps they embraced it as a 'rolling with the punches' thing, but I still think it was designed to make them look retarded, which they are.