RuneScape gamers have not relented since information broke a couple of days in the past that new Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy—additionally recognized in-community as Mod North—was successfully killing off Pleasure Month celebrations in RuneScape and Previous College RuneScape (OSRS) in an effort to “make sure the enterprise is protected in opposition to people who would want us hurt.”
Chatting with employees, Bellamy mentioned that Pleasure content material was “controversial in a manner it didn’t was once and that controversy now brings extra threat than it did beforehand, threat that I’m personally accountable to guard in opposition to.”
That did not mollify employees—who penned an open letter to Jagex execs asking to be allowed to run Pleasure content material—and it actually hasn’t mollified the neighborhood. Throughout social media, RuneScape gamers are in a steady uproar in regards to the rollback.
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“I labored on RuneScape 2005-2014,” wrote John Ayliff—former Jagex Mod John A—on Bluesky, “this makes me actually indignant. Cowardly and disgusting.”
“You absolute cowards,” wrote one other participant on X. “You dial again Pleasure content material since you’re terrified of imply tweets from alt-right losers on-line? All whereas pretending to nonetheless be an ‘ally’. Nobody’s falling for this.”
This being the RuneScape neighborhood, although, many of the protest has come within the type of absurdly particular shitposting and memes. Gamers have been circulating faux patch notes about “De-Gaying” RuneScape and OSRS by, as an example, eradicating the multi-hued Fancy Boots from the sport and banning anybody sporting the much more ostentatious Fancier Boots.
Elsewhere, some gamers are merely internet hosting their very own, community-run Pleasure occasions, with some proving standard sufficient that the sport struggled to render all of the attendees.
On Reddit, poster FemaleAssEnjoyer (there are advanced semiotics at work right here) shared a preferred mock-up of “Summer season Sweep-Up Pt 2″—a parody of Jagex’s (actual) Summer season Sweep-Up replace from final Could. As a way to stay “an escape from the extra ‘undesirable’ elements of actuality,” the Pt 2 replace declares that OSRS can be promptly eradicating “All indigenous or in any other case ethnically problematic NPCs, any NPCs with out confirmed, documented Gielinorian citizenship,” and, after all, “Girls.”
Elsewhere on Reddit, some customers have emblazoned themselves with a “No homosexual, no pay” badge to protest the adjustments to Pleasure—itself a cheeky inversion of a homophobic slogan, “We pay, no homosexual,” deployed by some customers when Jagex introduced Pleasure content material in 2017.
STONKS 📉 from r/2007scape
The memes are absurd and plentiful, and present no signal of letting up. Underlying them, after all, is a real sense of harm and betrayal on the a part of RuneScape’s LGBT+ neighborhood, which had grown used to the annual Pleasure content material solely to have it yanked out from below them at a time when the queer neighborhood is below assault.
“The truth is that any ‘impartial’ place solely emboldens bigots,” writes a participant on the OSRS subreddit. “Twitter is completely full of posts praising Jagex for lastly ‘eliminating the woke mob’. I am positive Jagex would say ‘that wasn’t our intention, we simply do not wish to endorse both facet!’, however in so doing, they’ve platformed the worst of their participant base.”
