YouTube star PewDiePie has asked his fans to stop using the “Subscribe to PewDiePie” meme and is also ending his subscriber battle with India’s largest music label and movie studio T-Series after the initially fun and positive movements took a more serious turn.
In his latest video, PewDiePie described how the “Subscribe to PewDiePie” meme started off as a way to maintain his position as the most subscribed channel on YouTube. He highlighted how most people using the meme embraced the fun, positive tone and showed some examples of this which included YouTubers purchasing billboards encouraging people to “Subscribe to PewDiePie,” cheerleaders doing a dance to encourage people to “Subscribe to PewDiePie,” and a PewDiePie parade taking place in Tallinn, Estonia.
However, he acknowledged that as the meme grew larger, it was used by a few degenerates including an individual who vandalized a World War Two memorial with the phrase “Subscribe to PewDiePie” and the Christchurch shooter who said “Subscribe to PewDiePie” while committing the horrific murders.
PewDiePie said the World War Two memorial vandalization was disgusting and it was disappointing to have his name and community dragged into that. He disavowed the incident at the time and donated to the park.
PewDiePie also disavowed the Christchurch shooter’s actions at the time and gave his sincerest condolences to anyone affected. He says he chose not to address it any further at the time out of respect to the families and victims involved. He added:
“To have my name associated with anything so unspeakably vile has affected me in more ways than I’ve let show. I just didn’t want to address it right away and I didn’t want to give the terrorist any more attention. I didn’t want to make it about me because I don’t think it has anything to do with me. To put it plainly, I didn’t want hate to win but it’s clear to me now the Subscribe to PewDiePie movement should have ended then.”
PewDiePie then moved on to talk about the rivalry with T-Series and specifically the two T-Series diss track videos – “B*tch Lasagna” and “Congratulations.” He said the videos were meant to be fun, ironic, in jest, and not to be taken seriously. Now that the Delhi High Court of India has ordered the videos to be taken down, it’s clearly gone too far and is not fun anymore. He added that he will be keeping the videos blocked in India.
He finished by saying:
“I don’t want hitting 100 million subscribers to be about beating another channel. I think what we’ve accomplished is so much more than that and I just want to say I feel incredibly lucky to have such an amazing group of people supporting me. I think I can say that because I know them better than anyone. Unironically I’m so proud of this community. This movement started out of love and support so let’s end it with that.”
