'No gay, no pay': The RuneScape community is absolutely mauling Jagex's new CEO over his decision to cancel new Pride Month events
RuneScape players haven't relented since news broke a few days ago that new Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy—also known in-community as Mod North—was effectively killing off Pride Month celebrations in RuneScape and Old School RuneScape (OSRS) in order to "ensure the business is protected against those that would wish us harm."
Speaking to staff, Bellamy said that Pride content was "controversial in a way it didn’t used to be and that controversy now brings more risk than it did previously, risk that I’m personally responsible to protect against."
That didn't mollify staff—who penned an open letter to Jagex execs asking to be allowed to run Pride content—and it certainly hasn't mollified the community. Across social media, RuneScape players are in a continuous uproar about the rollback.
"I worked on RuneScape 2005-2014," wrote John Ayliff—former Jagex Mod John A—on Bluesky, "this makes me really angry. Cowardly and disgusting."
"You absolute cowards," wrote another player on X. "You dial back Pride content because you're scared of mean tweets from alt-right losers online? All while pretending to still be an 'ally'. No one's falling for this."
This being the RuneScape community, though, most of the protest has come in the form of absurdly specific shitposting and memes. Players have been circulating fake patch notes about "De-Gaying" RuneScape and OSRS by, for instance, removing the multi-hued Fancy Boots from the game and banning anyone wearing the even more ostentatious Fancier Boots.
Elsewhere, some players are simply hosting their own, community-run Pride events, with some proving popular enough that the game struggled to render all the attendees.
On Reddit, poster FemaleAssEnjoyer (there are complex semiotics at work here) shared a popular mock-up of "Summer Sweep-Up Pt 2"—a parody of Jagex's (real) Summer Sweep-Up update from last May. In order to remain "an escape from the more 'undesirable' parts of reality," the Pt 2 update declares that OSRS will be promptly removing "All indigenous or otherwise ethnically problematic NPCs, any NPCs without confirmed, documented Gielinorian citizenship," and, of course, "Women."
Elsewhere on Reddit, some users have emblazoned themselves with a "No gay, no pay" badge to protest the changes to Pride—itself a cheeky inversion of a homophobic slogan, "We pay, no gay," deployed by some users when Jagex announced Pride content in 2017.
STONKS ???? from r/2007scape
The memes are absurd and plentiful, and show no sign of letting up. Underlying them, of course, is a genuine sense of hurt and betrayal on the part of RuneScape's LGBT+ community, which had grown used to the annual Pride content only to have it yanked out from under them at a time when the queer community is under attack.
"The reality is that any 'neutral' position only emboldens bigots," writes a player on the OSRS subreddit. "Twitter is absolutely filled with posts praising Jagex for finally 'getting rid of the woke mob'. I'm sure Jagex would say 'that wasn't our intention, we just don't want to endorse either side!', but in so doing, they have platformed the worst of their player base."