There are a handful of Fortnite emotes that have become primarily known for their toxicity, and Epic Games is taking the unusual step of adding a toggle to the game settings that will allow you to never have to see other players do them.
The setting in question, which will be implemented in Tuesday’s update that kicks off Fortnite Festival Season 3, is the “See Confrontational Emotes” toggle under Account and Privacy. There are three options: Always see them, never see them, or only see them if your party members are doing them. If you choose to block these emotes, players will appear motionless to you, as if they hadn’t fired off an emote at all, when they use one of them. But regardless of which option you choose, you’ll always be able to see and hear the emotes if you do them.
There are currently four emotes that are affected by this: Laugh It Up (aka the donkey laugh), Take the L, Whipcrack, and Make It Plantain. Laugh It Up and Take The L are included because they’re common and particularly obnoxious taunts that players have complained about for years. Whipcrack and Make It Plantain, meanwhile, are popular among racist trolls.
Take the L was a battle pass emote from six years ago, so nobody’s been able to get that since then. The other three emotes were all sold in the item shop, but it’s been about six months since Whipcrack, which is a DC Comics emote belonging to Catwoman, and Make It Plantain have been available. And Laugh It Up hasn’t been sold in nearly two years, as Epic likely wanted it out of circulation a while ago.
By adding this toggle to the settings, Epic gets to avoid the hassle of removing any of these emotes from the game–usually Epic gives refunds when it does that, and permanently removing an old battle pass item would surely cause an uproar from the community.
