BrainSlug

BrainSlug is the bright green creature that replaced an earlier Twitch global under the same command. The original BrainSlug used the face of streamer Bwana. By 2013, viewers outside his own community had attached racist spam and a racist nickname to the face, overwhelming whatever ordinary meaning the emote had started with.

Bwana withdrew his face from global use rather than let the image continue functioning as a target for that abuse. Twitch then changed BrainSlug into a literal green slug-like creature, keeping the command while removing Bwana's photograph from the global emote.

The replacement developed its own identity in chat. During League of Legends Worlds, viewers used the green creature in slime-and-goo copypastas, including Cloud9 support chants in 2018 and G2 Esports chants in 2020. Those later jokes belong to the replacement image rather than the face-based BrainSlug that caused the controversy.

BrainSlug is an early example of Twitch viewers changing the meaning of a person's emote through repeated harassment. Bwana's face was not removed because of something he had done on stream. The problem was the way viewers repeatedly attached racist language to his image until the emote became associated with the abuse.

Replacing the photograph with a green creature preserved the BrainSlug command without preserving the target of the harassment. That distinction matters for the current exact identity: the green BrainSlug is the replacement that came after the controversy, while the earlier Bwana face belongs to a different historical image state.

The later Cloud9 and G2 slime copypastas show that the replacement eventually acquired a separate, non-person-based Twitch history.