Daenerys Targaryen may be the Mother of Dragons, but Imane Anys — better known by her gamer tag Pokimane — is the Mother of Gamer Girls. “Instead of Game of Thrones, I’m in Game of Games,” she jokes in an exclusive interview with Her Campus. As the most-followed female streamer on Twitch, with over 9.4 million followers as of November 2023, Anys is a trailblazer for female gamers — and she doesn’t take the title lightly.
Anys was one of the only female streamers on Twitch when she first joined the platform in 2013. Her success over the last 10 years has carved out space for more women to join the traditionally male-dominated online gaming community. She became a figurehead for female gamers, a status she’s highly conscious of. “For a long time, I very much felt that pressure in the back of my mind. I always wanted to make my female viewers proud and hopefully inspire them,” she says. “Nowadays, there are so many incredible female streamers that I feel like I can carry [my influence] as a badge of honor as opposed to always feeling like I need to uphold the expectations people might put on me.”
Anys says the gaming community’s makeup has changed “tremendously” since she first came on the scene. She credits the 2018 Fortnite boom and the COVID-19 pandemic for bringing gaming to a more mainstream audience. “It was what I always dreamed the streaming world would someday turn into,” she recalls of the gaming community in 2020. “It almost felt like there were just as many women watching as men.”
But with a mostly male audience backing her career over the years, Anys is no stranger to being objectified. She rarely acknowledges sexualized content of herself on the internet, but she admits, “I’m human, so it’ll always get to me to some extent. I try to avoid looking at those things as much as I can.”
Sexualization is an unfortunate and inevitable reality that most female public figures on the internet face. The issue is particularly pervasive in streaming. “As a female streamer, you have to work around so many things that perhaps your male counterparts don’t have to think twice about,” Anys says. “I’ve changed certain backgrounds and even installed walls in places where walls shouldn’t be to keep my location private.”
The support she gets from her female audience makes all her efforts worth it. “The most rewarding moments of my career are when someone comes up to me at a convention and says I inspired them to start streaming or made them feel like it was OK to be a female streamer. It warms my heart to feel like I can have such a profound impact on people just by being myself,” she says.
For any woman looking to break into a male-dominated industry, Anys’ biggest piece of advice is that “a good support system is absolutely key, especially if the people in that support system understand what you’re going through or have experienced it themselves. The reassurance I get from my female streamer friends is probably the only thing that has kept me going for so long.”
In July 2022, for the first time in her decade-long career, Anys took a break from uploading content. She explains her decision to step away came from “some mental and physical signs that were saying, Hey, do you need to slow down or maybe rethink the pace at which you’re going? I had a lot of thoughts and feelings around the downsides of having streamed so long.”
Being online and “on” for her audience all the time had gotten incredibly draining. Anys learned to prioritize her mental health during the break by “fully unplugging, disconnecting, and letting myself live as Imane and not always as Pokimane.”
The month-long break was just the creative inspiration Anys needed to branch out into different kinds of projects. Now, she’s ready to bring something new to the table — literally. On Nov. 13, the streamer launched a healthy snack line called Myna Snacks, which she designed with gamers’ indoor lifestyles in mind. The first product in her line? Midnight Mini Cookies, made with deep chocolate, white chips, and sea salt. The cookies contain Vitamin D and come in quiet packaging — perfect for eating during a stream.
Myna Snacks is just the start of Anys’ new creative journey. More Myna products are on their way, and she’s also gearing up to premiere a new content series at the end of November. “It’s been so fun trying a lot of new things. I finally feel ready to fully come back. It feels like a new chapter in my life,” Anys says. It’s time for her audience to turn the page with her.