On Saturday, Karina "Karupups" Martsinkevich was streaming herself preparing her Lifeline cosplay in Twitch's "Just Chatting" section to
roughly 160 viewers. Martsinkevich, who had dyed her hair and put on a white shirt and surgical mask, then applied a dark foundation to her face to mimic Lifeline's appearance. "On my stream, I wanted to show the viewers, how hard is to prepare for a cosplay, how much time the make up, costume and another details can take," Martsinkevich said in an email to
Kotaku.
The final result of Martsinkevich's cosplay is what's commonly recognized as blackface—when a non-black person attempts to caricature or present as a black person. It originated in the 1800s when white actors used shoe polish or burnt cork, sometimes on top of highlighting their lips or other features, to perform exaggerated and
racist stereotypes of black people. Martsinkevich's stream was taken down before she could finish her cosplay preparation in what constitutes a direct denouncement of blackface on Twitch.
After announcing her apparently 30-day suspension, Martsinkevich posted a YouTube video in which she explained that she was banned for "engaging in hateful conduct against a person or group of people." She went on to contend that she "just wanted to be similar to Lifeline from
Apex...it wasn't meant to have [sic] a joke of anyone. It was just a cosplay, guys, for my favorite legend from a computer game." The Twitch streamer says that she didn't mean for her cosplay "to be painful for anyone" and apologized to those who were hurt.
