Twitch streamer Imane “Pokimane” Ansys came under fire for the pricing of her new line of cookies. She didn’t help matters when she “joked” that people who couldn’t afford them were broke. She’s since apologized, but that hasn’t stopped Kick streamer Félix “xQc” Lengyel from adding his two cents.
XQc said in a Kick stream on Nov. 22 that he got way more attention for “flexing on a millionaire in private” than she did for “flexing on somebody broke as a millionaire,” as reported by Dexerto. He’s referring to DMs leaked by Ethan Klein of H3H3 back in August. XQc showed off his expensive watch in Klein’s DMs. I’d agree that calling your viewers poor on stream looks worse, but xQc has also done this kind of wealth-flexing on X (formerly known as Twitter) for all to see.
In the original Kick stream, xQc is reacting to a Ludwig video about the cookie drama. It starts around two hours and 34 minutes into the stream. Ludwig goes over Pokimane’s apology, where she says she was only replying to one person, not her whole community, but still says she shouldn’t have said what she said as it comes off very badly. He then goes on to criticize the amount of people making videos about the incident. This is where xQc interjects and claims he got way more hate for the H3H3 drama than Pokimane did for this.
It’s hard to definitively say without looking through every YouTube video. I searched both Pokimane cookie drama and xQc H3H3 drama, and it looks like there are more videos with more views about the cookie stuff. This is far from definitive, but it tracks with the experience of lots of women streamers: they get more, sustained hate for mistakes than male streamers do. Ludwig acknowledges sexism likely plays a part but thinks it’s all due to how famous Pokimane is. Evidence in his own video seems to counter this, though. He and Pokimane did the same Wired person answers the internet’s questions about them video, and hers got 10 times fewer views and more than three times as many dislikes. She’s also got over two million fewer followers than xQc.
Calling viewers broke for criticizing the price of your cookies is bad. But I’d argue promoting gambling streams and posting pictures of yourself with fat stacks of cash under criticisms of your reactions to the Israel-Gaza conflict is worse. And yet, it seems xQc still gets less hate, not more.
