Twitch Streamers Who Are Actually Terrible People

The internet isn't the most forgiving of places. It has a very, very long memory when it comes to low moments and epic fails, namely in the case of Twitch streamers. Just a few moments can ruin what could have otherwise been a fun, lucrative career. A single mistake can spell the end of one's time on Twitch and cement a name in internet infamy forevermore.

Making a mistake doesn't mean a person is a horrible human being. Repeatedly doing racist, misogynistic, and/or homophobic things and never apologizing? Those actions tick all the terrible boxes under the "total jerk" category. Twitch streamers are allowed to mess up now and again — say the wrong thing, commit to a bad decision — but the idea is that they later apologize and grow from the experience. Unfortunately, that isn't always the case. Here we have a group of repeat offenders that have avoided the black mark of a permanent ban, but have skirted that line pretty closely with some seriously bad behavior.

When someone as controversial as xQc, who got booted from the allegedly toxic Overwatch League, calls you out for being over-the-top, you might want to take it down a notch or two. Mitch Jones has made a name for himself on Twitch by being dramatic, demanding, and inconsistent. The first aspect may make for a popular streamer, but causing drama can only get one so far.

Mitch Jones caused drama by becoming obsessive with numbers: views, subscribers, donations. He would berate his own viewers into donating more, which can easily rub people the wrong way. Other streamers — even those he lived with — complained that he had gotten incredibly jealous when their streams were doing well. Jones had a penchant for calling up old controversies and attacking other streamers, once going on a rant about streamer GreekGodX that resulted in a petition to ban him and his content from r/livestreamfail, the subreddit Jones admitted to trawling, desperate to find mention of his own name.

There are a myriad of videos that speak to his volatile, almost paranoid nature. On stream, he would break down, saying that other streamers were out to get him and that no one, especially not his fans, had his back. Fans and fellow streamers alike said that Jones became more and more uninterested in streaming and increasingly obsessed with causing confrontation, willing to throw his friends under the bus for the sake of it.

Streamer Steven "Destiny" Bonnell II has been known to court controversy, which again, has increasingly become part of the formula for success on Twitch. Especially on subsections of Twitch such as IRL, the way to get views is to be doing the most outrageous, eye-catching thing, which Destiny does from the comfort of his desk. Destiny often plays Hearthstone and League of Legends, but he also has dedicated a significant amount of his stream to "debates." Topics can range anywhere from religion to gender to whatever happens to be most controversial at the moment.

For some people, these are touchy subjects, and Destiny isn't exactly removed from also getting just as heated as his stream's chat can. In January of 2018 he had gotten a seven-day ban for threatening another streamer, just before having been banned temporarily for exploiting a glitch in PUBG, and before that he was given a three-day ban for using the N-word on stream. Destiny's 30-day ban for offensive language is his biggest, but is unlikely the last in a long history of violating Twitch's community guidelines.

It's against Twitch's community guidelines to use language that facilitates discrimination based on sexual orientation. Destiny is no stranger to using homophobic slurs on stream. After the ban, he acknowledged that it was likely prompted by calling people the F-slur.

Felix "xQc" Lengyel was dropped from the Overwatch League for his outrageous behavior, but that hasn't stopped him from continuing his antics on Twitch. The first offense that put him on suspension from Dallas Fuel happened on livestream: upset over a loss he went on a homophobic rant that earned him four games on the bench and a fine of $2,000. This apparently didn't leave much of an impression on his conscience or his wallet because xQc was later unapologetic after catching public ire for calling casters "cancer."

He was fined another $4,000 for targeting another caster with racist emotes. All the drama caught up with him and he was released from the pro team. Now there's not as much oversight on his controversial behavior, but the streamer-turned-pro-turned-streamer was temporarily banned from Overwatch for abusive behavior in chat, which he seemed to actually and perhaps uncharacteristically regret. On Twitch, the temper hinted at in the Overwatch League is released full force: there are many a compilation of xQc screaming and smashing keyboards. Rage has become his brand, and for better or worse, it's a brand that sells.

TrainwrecksTV has a long history of behaving badly enough for a ban, and these stints in Twitch time-out all have one thing in common: misogyny. Namely, TrainwrecksTV has ranted repeatedly on stream that he has a problem with women on Twitch. In his words, women on Twitch are "the same sluts that rejected us, the same sluts that chose the goddamn cool kids over us. The same sluts that are coming into our community, taking the money, taking the subs, the same way they did back in the day." The rant just kept on going, a full seven minutes of hateful, derogatory language that reduced all female streamers down to abusive, manipulative minxes.

TrainwrecksTV made his opinion loud and clear, and this particularly vehement diatribe went viral and resulted in a five-day ban. TrainwrecksTV first questioned the validity of the ban, then said it was just satire, before eventually apologizing and saying that he didn't meant to bash the whole of the female gaming community.

Even after that, it wasn't long until his sexism resurfaced. Since the rant, he has appeared on stream yelling at a female streamer for being "disgusting" and "shameless" and going on a rant with a fraction of the run-time, but with the same amount of vicious misogyny as the original:

"Women and men are already equal. Some women have this chip on their shoulder where they have to prove that they're equal, so they play DPS on purpose and throw games."

Twitch IRL has a problem. The personalities that command the most views are forced to become louder, more outrageous than anyone else to keep fickle viewers entertained. 

These crazy stunts out on the streets and in the wild perhaps peaked in the swatting incident on a plane that permanently jettisoned one of the foremost faces of Twitch IRL, Ice Poseidon. Since the incident, he has gathered together a crew of streamers that have amassed their own scandals and controversies.

One of these streamers, Australian Chad "Anything4Views" Roberts has consistently taken things too far. He quickly cornered the market on being "that guy" who took the stream with him everywhere — even on Tinder dates that had unsuspecting women upset and uncomfortable. He made a name for himself by inserting himself into strangers' conversations with varying degrees of success. One thing was clear: he was unafraid of making people angry and would indeed do "anything for views."

Which is probably how he wound up in a situation where he unabashedly used racial slurs on stream, and directly to the face of a person of color, the Patreon model Jelzy who had joined Ice Poseidon's crew for a cross country RV road trip. That trip ended before it could even begin for Anything4Views, as he was banned from Twitch following his amused use of a word he knew he shouldn't say on stream.

If there is one thing that can unite the diverse and divisive place that is the internet, it's animals. Everyone loves dogs, and thus the internet was quick to band together and collectively turn on Simone "Aqualadora" Scott who admitted to killing a dog on stream. Her confession wasn't a tearful regret, or the natural hardship that comes along with the job of being a vet tech. Scott was dry-eyed as she told streamer RajjPatel that the worst thing she had ever done was intentionally kill a dog.

She said she got away with it because of the expectation of professionalism, that no one would have suspected that she had unnecessarily put down a perfectly healthy dog just because the owner was, in her words, "a really bad person." Patel and the other streamers she was talking to were shocked and quickly tried to change the subject, but Aqualadora didn't seem concerned about livestreaming such a heinous confession.

Patel was the first to be bombarded with messages demanding why he had her on the stream and if he condoned her actions. He made a statement that he absolutely did not and that she would never be welcomed on his platform again. It probably wasn't until hateful, even threatening messages started coming her way that Aqualadora realized the reach of the stream.

Ali "Gross Gore" Larsen lived up to his handle after a slew of sexual harassment allegations got him banned temporarily from Twitch, and ousted from TwitchCon. Gross Gore had played primarily League of Legends and RuneScape before the ban; the offending actions happened at the official RuneScape convention RuneFest. There, several people claimed that he had been generally creepy and continued to touch people after they had already asked him to stop. One video was posted (and later deleted) of him grabbing a woman's face in an attempt to kiss her.

Streamer Skiddler wrote about the incident on Twitter, saying that it had gotten physical after he was called out by several people for being inappropriate. Gross Gore allegedly got angry, and the crowd that had formed escalated into a full-on altercation that ended with Skiddler being kicked on the ground and the police showing up.

Gross Gore claims that things went differently, and that he was targeted for the sake of selling drama. Whatever happened, he did apologize for his "acting immaturely" and harassing women, but that apology might have dug the hole he was in even deeper. He blamed the woman he had made sexual comments to for wearing "a really, really, really revealing top."

He claimed that his 30-day suspension and ban from TwitchCon came not for the RuneFest allegations, but because of a clip of him following a female streamer around on his knees, just one clip of many featuring him bad-mouthing or harassing women.

There's something about TwitchCon that makes the crazies come out. All the excitement is apparently too much and people are unable to control themselves, or heed warnings from convention security. At 2017's TwitchCon, controversial streamer Hampton Brandon streamed his experience on Periscope, rather than Twitch. If he had been on Twitch, it's probably safe to assume that his actions would have earned him a hefty ban.

Hampton Brandon was already known for bad behavior and his arrest record, so it was no surprise when he started cat-calling women and saying some seriously vile things to the staff that asked him to stop streaming. The TwitchCon staff had their hands full that year with many attendees streaming live from TwitchCon and getting rowdy for the sake of content. As security was escorting him out of the convention center, Hampton Brandon continually tried to turn back around, leading to a brief scuffle with security. Outside, he shouted about TwitchCon to the point that the convention center's staff confronted him, and resorted to calling the local police when Hampton Brandon refused to leave the property.

There's a frankly disturbing amount of videos of him streaming himself trespassing in the back of restaurants, stores, and other businesses to the extent that the staff contacts the police. He even livestreamed his own arrest by a bounty hunter, still calling out to chat as he was cuffed.

It's to be expected that Twitch streamers might develop an ego. They have massive followings of fans who literally pay money for the chance to share their thoughts or their devotion to the streamer. The attention is enough to make anyone's head swell, but those fans and following don't mean that the streamer is then an inherently "better" person than the average viewer.

Except, to Michael "mmDust" Duarte it does.

In a rather cringe-y clip of a panel at TwitchCon, mmDust struggled to answer a question from the audience. The fan said that they want to be able to relate to a streamer, that they want a relationship with them. First, mmDust replied that he didn't want to a have a relationship with his fans — understandable considering that fans can sometimes take things too far — but then his thoughts started to spiral. Qualifying that what he was about to say was "low-key God complex," mmDust said that he thinks of himself as bigger and better, "above the average person."

The clip has been viewed a couple million times and the comments on it aren't the nicest; people are outraged that a relatively small streamer would be so arrogant. He started to get death threats and even said that a high school wrestling coach had reached out to him, saying that the video made him look like a jerk. mmDust apologized on TwitLonger and said that his answer had been "trash" and that he didn't think he was better than everyone.

Someone like TrainwrecksTV might say that streamer Amouranth is an example of "what's wrong with women on Twitch." She gets a lot of dumb, sexist critiques and remains a controversial figure on Twitch. Her main offense is doing ill-advised things while streaming to Twitch's IRL section, and she seems to have a penchant for that same transgression other IRL streamers seem to love: trespassing.

Like Hampton Brandon, Amouranth doesn't like to take no as an answer, which leads exasperated business owners to dial the police. On one stream, she spent nearly ten hours at a hair salon, unsatisfied with the results she was getting. The salon asked her to leave, but she refused until her hair was perfect. It wasn't until the police showed up and explained repeatedly that what she was doing was criminal trespass that she left, not even having to pay for the exorbitant amount of time spent there.

The whole scenario played out again in a clip gone viral of her streaming at a gym, her back to a huge wall mirror that revealed other people working out. The gym staff asked her a good many times not to film while she looked directly into the lens of her livestream and said that she wasn't. When she finally left after several staff members asked her, she was angry.

"It's because I'm white," she said to the stream. "I bet if I was some wealthy Saudi prince, they wouldn't want to kick me out."

Many a ban has occured over offensive trolling from donation messages for the sake of the lols, but there have also been some seriously touching moments. Fans use donation messages to tell streamers how much they mean to them, or that their stream got them through a tough time in the fan's life.

Smite streamer Brandon "DM Brandon" Nance got one such message on a $5 donation one night; "Tl;Dr I tried killing myself last August, discovered your videos once I was released, and Smite has become a positive outlet for me. Thanks."

Rather than feeling touched, DM Brandon became furious, going on a rant that had his own chat arguing with him. He berated the donor, calling them selfish and an "***hole." He went on to say that he hates when people complain about depression, that it's "this constant, ridiculous, self-pity bulls**t."

"If you decide to end your life or let these f***ing debilitating diseases ruin your life because you don't know how to deal with it, well then f***king good."

After the tirade, he said that he was trying to "wake up" the donor rather than attack them, but fans took his words and sent them to Smite's studio Hi-Rez, where he was employed as a caster, demanding if they supported his view on depression. Following the controversy, DM Brandon announced that he was leaving Hi-Rez and that he would no longer stream Smite.