Fans of Marvel Snap, the hugely popular, free-to-play card game, have come to a conclusion: the Ms. Marvel emote, the one where she’s grinning cheerfully, winking a bit and throwing up a thumbs up, is actually toxic as hell. Ms. Marvel might as well be giving you the finger and stomping on your entrails after she stole your wallet.
Most of the time, when I see gamers calling something “toxic,” I turn into Inigo Montoya from The Princess Diaries—“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” “Toxic,” I usually think, is a word for awful on-again, off-again college relationships, or for U.S. tap water. I wouldn’t normally use it in reference to a giddy superhero, wind blowing through her cartoon blowout, as she gives a supportive thumbs up, but most respondents to streamer SanchoWest’s Twitter inquiry about the toxic status of the emote would tell me I’m dead wrong.
“Do you see [Ms. Marvel] as a toxic emote?” SanchoWest asks.
“Put simply……… yes,” says one popular reply.
“I hope so, because if you see me use it just know I’m trying to be toxic,” another respondent admits.
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You can use a few different emotes, which, other than Ms. Marvel, includes Deadpool with arrows in his head and snapping Thanos , or pre-written phrases like “Snap?” and the Patrick Bateman-esque “I am confident,” to communicate with other players as soon as you join a match with them. Ms. Marvel is a popular after-match spam, though, so I can understand how her thumb in that context becomes a defiant hate speech symbol.
One Redditor said in a thread, “When people use the Ms. Marvel thumbs up emote after I lose…I want to dive through my monitor and punch my opponent’s face until it’s nothing but a pile of bone and brains.” Oh, OK. But Ms. Marvel is the toxic one? Yeah, OK. That makes sense.
Have you guys heard of the word “rude”?