The Shady Side Of Pokimane

She's the most popular female streamer on Twitch (and the sixth most popular overall at the time of this writing), but the reign of Imane "Pokimane" Anys hasn't been without its controversies. The Moroccan-Canadian walked away from a chemical engineering degree to pursue a career in gaming, and it turned out to be a wise choice — she shot to prominence playing Fortnite and League of Legends in 2017, nabbing the Shorty Award for Best Twitch Streamer along the way. Her rise to the top of the industry was meteoric and, for a time, the stream queen seemed untouchable, but every internet star has a paper trail. The bigger you get, the further people will dig into your past, and as Pokimane would find out, trying to bury your mistakes will only make things worse for you.

Although she's only been a streaming star for a few years, as of this writing, the gamer and YouTube star already has a slew of controversies, public apologies, and more controversies under her belt. As such, she's rapidly becoming one of the most divisive characters in the online gaming community — but are the things they say about her actually true? Does she really deserve all the hate that gets thrown her way? You be the judge. Let's take a look at the shady side of Pokimane.

Pokimane's use of the n-word is not limited to that one embarrassing live stream. The gamer also used the word in a now-deleted tweet that she estimated was around five years old during her 2020 apology video, in which she told her millions of YouTube subscribers (and the users just stopping by for the drama) that this kind of language is most definitely not okay. "I don't want my deletion of these things or my silence now to make it seem otherwise," she said. "I've commented on this in the past, but honestly, my statement or comments then weren't even good enough... I just want to make it clear that I am genuinely so sorry if I hurt or offended anyone with what I said."

She was accused of using the n-word again as recently as 2019, when another incriminating clip from a live stream started doing the rounds. She appears to use the slur while playing League of Legends, but according to her, only those with an untrained ear hear it. When YouTube gossip monger Keemstar tweeted the clip, Pokimane called him a "fake gamer" for not realizing what she was actually saying. "I said 'this anivia' (sounded like 'this nivia'), aka a champion in League of Legends," she replied, adding, "On the real, stop baiting likes by spreading lies." While some came to her support in the comments, others weren't convinced, and neither was Keemstar: "I hear HARD G!"

Keemstar's parting dig at Pokimane during their big argument was that she "can't pay rent without donations from virgins," a variation on an insult that's been thrown at her on countless occasions. The streamer has been known to receive large sums from male admirers (in December 2019 a Twitch user named Misterjons94_ gifted her $2020 during a stream, in celebration of the coming year), and there's a perception that she takes advantage of lonely fans, many of whom are ridiculously dedicated to her. It was PewDiePie who first exposed their levels of devotion to the wider internet, featuring a screen capture of an interaction between Pokimane fans in one of his try-not-to-cringe videos.

In the conversation (originally shared on the /r/sadcringe subreddit) one fan complains about having to donate less than they usually would that particular month. "Yeah man, I get it," came a reply. "My wife's been bugging me about this holiday I promised her like eight months ago, but the squad comes first #devoted #pokisquad." People now tend to think of Pokimane fans as a bunch of simps (a simp being a guy who irrationally idolizes a usually-famous female in 2020 internet parlance). When one Twitter user told her that there are people out there who treat her as a virtual girlfriend, she admitted that it was probably true. "All I can do is discourage that sort of thought pattern/behavior," she said in a now-deleted tweet (via Dexerto).

Pokimane found herself back in PewDiePie's firing line in 2019, when he called her out for a practice that's deeply frowned upon in the YouTube community — copyright striking. The whole episode began when a YouTuber named Bowblax decided to upload a timeline of Pokimane's fight with Keemstar, a kind of slideshow containing every insult that was traded during the row. Pokimane argued that the video used too much of her unedited content and had it taken down. This didn't sit well with PewDiePie, who pointed out that she uses other people's content in her videos all the time. "What bothers me most... is the hypocrisy," the Swedish star said, adding, "I would say 90 percent of content on the internet — or at least on YouTube and Twitch — isn't 100 percent original content."

When Pokimane saw PewDiePie's video, she responded with a video of her own, standing her ground when it came to the strike. "Bowblax strung together all the tweets and videos from Twitter and just re-uploaded to YouTube with no editing or commentary or voiceover," she said, claiming that it wasn't "transformative content" and therefore deserved to be taken down. Over a year would pass before she would admit that she was probably wrong about that. "This was my mistake," she said. "At the time, I didn't consider the fairness of leaving that video up, as well as not properly understanding the fair use defense when it comes to transformative content."

In 2020, notorious YouTube roaster LeafyIsHere returned to the platform with Pokimane in his crosshairs. He wouldn't be back for long — the now-deleted videos he made about the streamer quickly led to a permanent ban. Leafy called the streaming queen out for a number of things, but what really got people talking was his accusation that Pokimane has a secret boyfriend who she keeps on the down low so as not to discourage her deep-pocketed male fans. This wasn't a new theory. Months before Leafy's short-lived comeback, Keemstar claimed that Pokimane was pretending to be "single online so sad lonely guys donate money" to her, calling it "fake and pathetic" to boot.

Like the rest of us, internet personalities should be allowed to date whomever they want, but the figures do show that Pokimane is more appealing to viewers when she's available. As the #pokimaneboyfriend hashtag started to gather steam following Leafy's controversial videos, there was a noticeable drop off in her subscriber numbers. She didn't deny having a boyfriend in her apology video — in fact, she seemed to roundabout confirm that she'd been keeping a relationship secret for some time. "I understand some people want to relate this to donations, but you can also argue that one can make a lot of money by publicizing the relationship or making content out of it," she said. "I personally want to be able to experience my relationships without the scrutiny of an online audience."

Pokimane's rise to power has split the online gaming community, and that divide seemed to deepen significantly in 2020. The streamer has done some stupid and indefensible things (missing the "hard R" off the end of the n-word doesn't give you a pass, no matter how you frame it), but many are of the opinion that there's a lot of unwarranted hate directed at Pokimane on account of her gender. She's been vocal about women being held to different standards in the gaming industry, and in June 2020, she was involved in what CNN called the gaming world's first big #MeToo moment.

It all started when female gamers from the OfflineTV house outed Federico "Fedmyster" Gaytan for sexual misconduct, which he did not deny. According to Pokimane, Gaytan would lie to people about her love life and try to manipulate her friends. "I had a lot of trust issues with him," she said, adding that she and her female colleagues had no choice but to go public after private attempts at resolving his behavior failed. She got some blowback over the whole thing because, well, that's the internet for you, but she's ultimately trying to make the gaming industry a more welcoming place for women, and that should be applauded. "If a community is male-dominated, there's bound to be biases," she tweeted. "I hope that, in this day and age, we can learn to be both fair and empathetic with others regardless of this."