Bungie Latinx Controversy

Submission 10,297

Part of a series on Latinx. [View Related Entries]

Overview

Bungie Latinx Controversy refers to a post on X / Twitter in early October 2023 by the gaming company Bungie (best known for creating Halo and Destiny) in which the developer used the controversial term "Latinx." The post, meant to be about Bungie's inclusiveness of Hispanic language and culture, was quickly ratioed by Latino fans of the studio, subsequently resulting in notable backlash and memes or jokes mocking the company's use of the term.

Background

On October 2nd, 2023, Bungie posted a message on X^[1] in which it used Latin/a/e/o/x as an attempt to be inclusive of the different non-gendered identities of their Hispanic fans. Within this message, the company also claimed that Hispanic is a language and included a flag of a brown raised fist holding a lightning bolt, gaining over 12 million views in 18 hours (shown below).

Online Reactions

The post immediately created controversy within the Latino community, as many did not appreciate the term "Latinx" and considered it erasure and disrespectful of the language because it has the clearly defined words "Latino" and "Latina," as well as rules dictating the usage of letters to end words.

As the X post garnered attention on October 2nd, 2023, it led to a considerable amount of backlash in the comments and replies, which were also hidden en masse by Bungie, leading to additional callouts via QRTs. For example, on October 3rd, X user @NECR0NOMIC0N_FS^[2] posted a QRT in which they broke down their reasoning, as a Latina, why Latinx isn't good and how Bungie hiding the replies of their Latino fans who are against Latinx was hypocritical (shown below).

On October 3rd, 2023, X user @DestinyBulletn^[3] posted a screenshot of the Bungie tweet, noting that it had been hit by a Community Note that called out the usage of Latinx. This was notably the second Community Note to hit the post, as it references the previous note that was screenshotted. Following this community note, a third one hit the post in Spanish that explained to non-American-centric Hispanics the Americanized politics of using Latinx (shown below).