Olivia Richman 
League of Legends has been dealing with a lot of controversy over its newest emotes, and the latest emote may have resulted in popular streamer Maks “Drututt” Przychodzien getting banned from Twitch.
Drututt is a Twitch Partner with nearly 593,000 followers. He’s been growing in popularity due to his personality-filled and high-level League of Legends streams. This includes a lot of dark and dirty humor, although a recent joke may have gone too far for Twitch’s taste.
Here’s what apparently got Drututt banned from Twitch for 14 days.
Why was Drututt banned from Twitch?
After it was announced that Drututt’s Twitch channel was banned on Twitch, the streamer took to X to inform his fans of the reason why. According to Drututt, he was suspended for two weeks over a joke he made regarding the most recent League of Legends emote.
Riot recently revealed a new emote that shows champion K’Sante, who is black, wearing a “copium” breathing device. The name of the emote is “Lemme Breathe,” which caused League of Legends fans to immediately draw a comparison to George Floyd, a black man who infamously died during a police arrest and was quoted as saying that he couldn’t breathe.
As gamers started questioning Riot’s thought process while creating and naming the emote, Drututt chimed in with a sentiment on stream based on the controversy, comparing it to other recent emotes that Riot censored.
Drututt then asked his fans if the comparison was worthy of a Twitch ban. Fans responded to him on X, telling him that Twitch was “too soft” and that he was right to believe that the K’Sante emote was “tone deaf.”
League of Legends emotes are causing controversy
Strangely enough, this is not the first time in the last month that League of Legends emotes caused a controversy. Two weeks ago, Riot “censored” Team BDS’ Pengu emote. It originally showed a Pengu holding up an empty fishing hook, but this was quickly changed to a Pengu holding a fish on its line after Leauge of Legends players started using the original version to threaten each other to hang themselves.
100 Thieves’ Akali emote was also changed a few days prior. It originally showed the champion making a gesture that players interpreted as mocking one another’s manhood. Riot decided to change the hand gesture altogether to remove that potential implication.
Both of these changes were not popular with League of Legends players, who felt the emotes were “nerfed.” Other players suggested that the community had caused Riot to react through the response to the emotes.
So far it seems as though Riot has not made any changes to the Lemme Breathe emote, leaving the League of Legends fan base concerned and confused about why some emotes are censored while others aren’t.
