Soon after his return from a month-long ban, content creator Sebastian “Forsen” Fors is facing even more backlash on Twitch.
Forsen told viewers last night that some of his classic emotes were being removed because the streaming platform felt they were potentially offensive. The removed emotes include ForsenTake, ForsenA, ForsenBreak, and ForsenDED. When used together, the four emotes spell out “stop streaming” and hint that zero people are watching.
“They can be used to harass other streamers,” Forsen said somewhat sarcastically.
Forsen seemed a bit frustrated with the decision despite his having used the emotes to mess with other streamers in the past. A fan pointed out that Forsen initially added the emotes so he could “banter” with other streamers without getting banned for writing out or saying anything offensive.
ForsenDED was possibly added so Forsen could annoy Byron “Reckful” Bernstein specifically. Reckful would often appear frustrated when his viewer count was lower than usual, so Forsen created the “zero viewership” emote just to mess with him. Reckful ended up banning the emote from his chat.
Even though Twitch wasn’t as harsh with their harassment policies back then, Forsen was already starting to face backlash from using the emotes from other streamers who found them offensive.
Forsen losing Twitch emotes is nothing new
This is not the first time that Twitch has targeted Forsen’s emotes. In the fall of 2019, Twitch had the streamer remove two emotes that the platform deemed “obscene” according to their Emoticon Guide.
The two emotes in question were ForsenDiglett and ForsenChraken. The emotes appear to depict a man with a hand tightly around his throat and a look of panic on his face. While the image was unclear, Twitch’s guidelines state that “extreme or gratuitous depictions of violence, severe injury, and death” are not allowed.
“Apparently, according to Twitch, it’s some dude strangling some dude. I don’t know, some weird shit. I don’t know how they can see that,” Forsen said at the time. “It doesn’t look anything like that… We have to find another emote.”
Forsen emotes under fire again, Dr Disrespect leads the charge
In 2018, popular personality Herschel “Dr Disrespect” Beahm IV also called on a Forsen emote to be removed.
Forsen was known for his memes at the time, one of which was his ForsenE emote, which depicted the Doc’s sunglass-clad face with a CD reflected in the lenses. The emote originated when Forsen was playing Darwin Project. Subscriber donations would come with the message “D Omegalul C,” which spells out DOC. The automated voice would read the message as “Omegalul CD.”
At the end of 207, Dr Disrespect announced that he was taking a break from streaming to deal with personal family issues. This was after it was discovered the Two-Time was cheating on his wife. In early 2018, Forsen fans celebrated Dr Disrespect’s return by spamming his chat with the ForsenE emote.
Since most of the popular streamers backing the trend also didn’t really know what the true meaning of the spammed emote was, Dr Disrespect felt it was an attack on his infidelity. Whether or not this meaning was intended, it seemed that the Two-Time was getting fed up with the spam. He called Forsen fans “babies” in a since-deleted tweet.
“I was surprised that he got that upset over the pixels when, I mean, he’s known for trash talking 90 percent of the big streamers on this platform,” Forsen said at the time. “That was his thing. Constantly. I’m a little bit surprised, but I don’t really care.”
Twitch banned the emote and started punishing people for using it, labeling it as harassment.
