Gamer Pride Month

About

Gamer Pride Month refers to a parody social media campaign participants of which change their profile pictures to color yellow for the duration of month July to express solidarity with "opressed gamers" in the spirit of Gamers Rise Up memes, parodying both solidarity profile picture changes such as Blue for Sudan, and the LGBTQ+ Pride Month. The campaign gained significant spread on Instagram in early July 2019.

Origin

On June 30th, 2018, Twitter user @jakegrnr reposted an image made by an unknown author in which Sonic the Hedgehog announced the start of the "gamer month" (shown below).^[12] In the following day, the image was also posted to /r/GamersRiseUp^[13] and /r/okbuddyretard^[14] subreddits.

On July 2nd, 2018, iFunny user Sovie made a text post explaining an intention to inconspicuously plant an idea for a "gamer month" by creating non-ironic posts about it on Reddit and Change.org, as well as making shitposts on /r/GamersRiseUp subreddit (shown below).^[1] The post gained over 3,700 smiles in one year and was republished by multiple accounts.^[2]

Spread

In the following days, multiple memes about the gamer month were made on iFunny^[3][4] and in ironic communities such as /r/GamersRiseUp.^[5][6] Multiple users posted designs for a "gamer pride" flag (examples shown below).^[7]

In June 2019, more posts about July 2019 being a "gamer month" or a "gamer pride month" were posted on Twitter and Reddit. On June 1st, Twitter user @NEFURIOUS_SKULL posted a flag "for gamers, the most oppressed of genders" (screenshot shown below)_.^[8][9] The post gained over 720 retweets and 1,200 likes before the account has been suspended sometime in the following month.

The exact origin of the yellow profile pictures idea is currently unconfirmed. On July 1st, 2019, Twitter user @oskmosouthpaw tweeted "Change your profile picture to yellow to raise awareness for gamers during Gamer pride month" with the tweet gaining 4 retweets and 8 likes.^[15] On July 2nd, 2019, Twitter user @Trickassbichh made a similar tweet, which received over 130 retweets and 200 likes in two days (shown below). In the following hours, screenshots of the tweets were reposted by multiple users on Instagram, including notable reposts by users alpha.coach^[10] and spicy.mp4^[11].

As the awareness of the parody campaign spread, multiple users on Instagram either set their profile pictures to solid yellow color, or used a yellow background.

Search Interest

External References