Well that’s not a headline I thought I’d ever be writing. As of today, Fortnite has disabled its “Peaceful Hips Emote,” which was a part of its collaboration with DC’s Peacemaker, whose second season is airing right now.
Peacemaker is known for its silly dance intros, and this emote is the first few seconds of this season’s. But there’s a theory that this specific dance move may be a subtle nod to Nazism and/or a swastika.
I’ll stop you there as it’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. In episode 6 of Peacemaker this week (spoilers follow), it was revealed that an “idyllic” alternate dimension Peacemaker stumbled into was actually a white-only version of America that lost World War II to the Nazis, culminating in the revelation of the stars of the American flag being replaced by a swastika.
Past that, there have been at least a dozen or more hints that were woven into that dimension that clued players in that this was a Nazi-based world well before this. An all-white background cast. No American flags shown (until the end). A DC city name with an unusual German pronunciation. After the fact, however, fans began to theorize that the dance that Cena’s Peacemaker did at the start was also a clue.
In this specific dance move, the motions of his arms actually form an H (two Hs would…also be a problem). So it’s not actually a swastika shape if you overlay them. However, fans have noticed that this move is something, believe it or not, Donald Duck performed dressed as a Nazi in a famed, actually Oscar-nominated anti-Nazi wartime short. Seriously:
Fans began to realize that if this was true, then Fortnite now had a potential Nazi reference as an emote, and a few days after the episode aired, the emote is now disabled as Epic tries to suss this out:
“As we inquire into our partner’s creative intentions in this collab emote. Assuming it’s not coming back, we’ll issue refunds in the next few days.”
That does not sound terribly promising coming from an official Epic account. Another wrinkle here is that James Gunn was famously secretive about episodes 6-8 of Peacemaker which contained the Nazi twist and its aftermath, saying he only showed it to a few close friends. WB no doubt probably knew about the storyline, but would they have known every subtle thing he slipped in there? I doubt it, and I certainly doubt the Fortnite collab squad would have.
The famously vocal James Gunn is likely to chime in about this, but he is currently defending himself against the idea that he made the Superman conflict mirror the current Israel/Gaza war, saying he wrote the script well before this most recent phase of the conflict. So we’ll see if he pauses to address the dance issue.
I don’t know, it’s hard to say for sure what the “intent” is here for sure, and who knows what Gunn will say. But this is a show that just had a Nazi reveal twist foreshadowed by a ton of subtle cues on the show and then there’s this…Donald Duck thing. But regardless, it looks like emote is gone for good if Epic doesn’t want to take any chances.
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