Trihard is one of the most prominent emotes in the Twitch community. Like Kappa or ResidentSleeper, it’s become a crucial fixture for the subculture’s linguistics, and Trihex has embraced his face’s canonization with open arms. The Trihard is his calling card; you can find it all over his YouTube channel thumbnails, and he takes giddy pride in its top-three placement amongst all Twitch emotes.
Trihex is black, and if you spend enough time on Twitch, you’ll see Trihards used to denigrate people of color. From my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen the emote fill chat feeds when a personality uses an innocuous word like “steal” on stream. In Hearthstone broadcasts, Trihards are sometimes posted when players play a spell called “Burgle” or summon King Mukla, an in-universe stand-in for King Kong. Sometimes, Trihards are used to target and harass specific people. Last year Terrence “TerrenceM” Miller, a black Hearthstone pro, made an impressive, second-place run at Dreamhack Austin, but was bombarded by racist messages, many punctuated with Trihards. At TwitchCon, last October, a diversity panel’s chatbox was hijacked in a similar way. The video game community’s racism problem is nothing new, but now, Jefferson’s face has emerged as a de facto slur.
in a video addressing the controversy, “Nothing in the emote is racist at all. It’s not like there’s exaggerated lips, or anything to make it look offensive. It’s a picture of me very, very happy.” His position is understandable, Trihex isn’t interested in letting anyone tell him what his face does and doesn’t mean.
“If for any reason I got rid of the Trihard emote, or if was deemed derogatory speech or whatever, all chat would do is migrate ‘cmonbruh,’ ‘punchtrees,’ and ‘kevinturtle’—the other black guy emotes,” he said. “If anything you’re empowered them, you’ve told them, ‘Oh, if we cause enough ruckus, we caused them to react.’ If you give the shytters attention they’ll say ‘Let’s just rock and roll further.’ ... It goes back to the accountability of the individual with the context, not the emote.”
Trihex also doesn’t want to obscure the fact that the emote is associated with more innocent definitions. “It is used for racism a lot, but it’s also used for good a lot,” he said. “One of the way the emote is being used for good that I’m really proud of is there’s a Dota 2 streamer named Arteezy, and when he’s winning really hard, he’ll put Trihard on the screen, and cover his minimap. He’ll finish the match without using his minimap and call it ‘Trihard mode.’ His chat is spamming Trihard all day. Clearly it’s a play on the face—because I look hyped in the face—and it’s a play on the pun of the emote itself. If you’re ‘trying hard’ ... you gotta turn off the minimap to win in style.”
Essentially, Trihex is fighting for the purity of Trihard, to make sure that its translation remains firmly in his grasp. He also holds a surprisingly unsympathetic position towards those who want to see it removed. In that same video where he lays out his love for the emote, he wraps things up by echoing some of the diction used in alt-right circles. “It’s a great emote that itself does not [promote] racism, so for those who want to get rid of it: dude, your mods suck, your mods are cucklords, you gotta talk to this community and clean that shyt up, it can be done,” he said. “Or change your snowflake values of what you get offended by, because it’s all over the internet,”
When I asked him if he’s ever bothered when Trihard is used to hound people of color on Twitch, he adopted a slightly softer tone, but still put the onus on the streamer to govern their chat, rather than blaming the audience.
“If [streamers] were to ask me about [getting harassed,] it I’d say ‘You need to set your culture better, you probably have crap mods that aren’t doing a good job, and you have to set a tone,” he replied. “If you don’t curate your culture and your environment as early as possible, then you’re going to let your viewers remain toxic. You have to call out what you want to call out. You are building your castle, and if you allow those things to happen, people are going to get the mindset that you’re okay with that. I personally don’t take racism very seriously. To me it’s just people trying to provoke you.”
https://kotaku.com/one-of-the-most-famous-faces-on-twitch-refuses-to-let-t-1820333034
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This Dude is such a fukking c00n
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