What is “cancel culture”? If we ask Gonzalo Torné, writer and author of the short essay The cancellation and its enemies, will answer us that they are only “empowered audiences”. In other words, a public that has mechanisms to penalize figures whose past or present behavior does not conform to the new social etiquette. A public that has become aware of its power, that knows that it has the tools to organize itself and that does not attend impassively, as in the past, the invulnerability of fame.
An audience, in short, that can punish even the most popular of streamers.
Goodbye AuronPlay. He announced it a few hours ago: AuronPlay, fourteen million followers on Twitch, is leaving the extremely popular platform streaming for an indefinite time. He has not given very specific reasons: “I am very burned out on the internet (…) I have been dedicating myself to content creation for eleven years and it has been noticed lately. I have had a time in which I have opened streaming angry and grumpy. I have been noticed, for example, with the ESLAND thing.” Nor a date (three days, one week, one month).
The closure also affects the rest of its social networks, Twitter included. Eleven years of professional activity later, AuronPlay has grown tired of being “on the Internet 24/7”.
Problems. Or maybe it’s the other way around? AuronPlay may have grown tired of the Internet, but it is certain that a part of the Internet has grown tired of it. His first outburst came after the second edition of the ESLAND Awards, a kind of “Oscar” for the community streamer and youtuber organized since last year by The Gregf. AuronPlay was at the center of the controversy, first, for being absent from the ceremony as it was held in Mexico City, a position shared by the also very popular elRubius.
Second, for his reaction to the distribution of prizes. AuronPlay was the streamer with the most nominations along with Ibai (five each) and took a total of… Zero individual awards. His reaction to the defeat was not magnanimous, charging against the voting system (very dependent on the vote of the jury, where Ibai or IlloJuan came out more favored): “If I am nominated next year, I will tell The Grefg that I resign from the category as long as I follow this voting system with people who are going to do everything possible so that I don’t take it with me”.
the real problems. The matter obviously raised acrimony with the rest of the community streamer, I was in the lead. AuronPlay has never stood out for being the streamer/youtuber friendliest in the industry, an issue that may have turned against you in recent days. Last week, the youtuber AxelBlaze16 interviewed Ithaisa Suárez, mother of Yeremi Vargas, a child who disappeared in the Canary Islands fifteen years ago. During the conversation, Suárez confessed that a now popular content creator, Sara Modelo, harassed him on social networks cruelly mocking her son.
Communicating vessels. Sara Modelo is the real name of Biyín, one of the most popular youtubers in Spain, Latin America and… AuronPlay’s partner. Having made the accusations, Biyín chose to deny them on her Twitch channel (three million followers): “She is a lady who accuses me of some things that, I don’t know, one of two things: either she is making a mistake or someone is paying her. She arrives a point that I don’t even know what to believe anymore. I want to think that this person is getting confused. I am many things in this life, but an asshole and a fool, no.”
—bumi ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ (@tanyeternals) February 5, 2023
Biyín did turn out to be forgetful. during the last days numerous tweets have emergedalready deleted, in which the long string of jokes of dubious taste published by Biyín against Yeremi Vargas and others is verified racialized groups: “The thing about his dead and penetrated son reassures me, they did worse things to the Jews, and it’s not that they both didn’t deserve it.” The messages date from 2013. At that time, Biyín seemed to have many things to say about Jews or Latin Americans: “It has been a good afternoon to have a neo-Nazi meetup and blow up a few Peruvian heads.”
What are you doing Auron? Nazi stuff? The torrent of rescued messages has been so powerful that it has ended up affecting Auron, although his jokes they were much less brutal. Faced with such overwhelming evidence and against a background far more racist than comic, Bijín accepted his past behavior and tried to apologize on Twitch. Some of his statements:
I did black humor, I apologize, I was an asshole. I feel bad if someone had a hard time for me (…) Now I see him as a 31-year-old adult and I’m fucking ashamed of what he did and what I spent my time on. I’m fucking ashamed and disgusted (…) You take things from ten years ago and that means I’ve been doing well up to now. It hurts me that yesterday many people, who I don’t care about, knowing how funas are, participated and were enjoying it. That seems to me to be a nefarious person.
The statement would not pass the filter of a public relations specialist. AuronPlay and Biyín justified their past behavior through “black humor” and the use of “nazi” as a meme. First-class material for El Mundo Today, which has summed up Biyín’s clumsiness well with a story entitled Adolf Hitler asks that the Holocaust not be taken out of context: “They are things [ser nazi y difundir el nazismo] that were done before and that at that time were funny because it was a thing of black humor and being provocative, but there is no more and I am not going to give more explanations on this subject”.
The end of the getaway. The media storm has broken the patience of AuronPlay. Although he does not refer to racist jokes in his farewell, he has suggested it in a veiled manner: “I am not a current or technology streamer. I am comedy, humor and I dedicate myself to making people laugh. I don’t feel like laughing.” He has also cited the death of his cat as an emotional burden that has taken its toll on him. The mixture of irascibility from the awards and, above all, his vulnerable public position after the Bijín controversy have filled a glass that had been filling up many years.
Nature. Was it inevitable that content generated in the past by AuronPlay or other content creators would turn against them? To a certain extent, yes: as Mozo Yefímovich explains here, a large part of AuronPlay’s original success consisted of more or less wild jokes (remember “caranchoa”) aimed at an adolescent audience. The smaller scale of their audience (and other public sensitivity) allowed them to ignore controversies like the current ones, so insurmountable that they have ended canceling to one of the main streamers of the world.
Image: Twitch
