PBS pulled a documentary about a trans speedrunner. So the director put it on Twitch instead.

Speedrunning is one of gaming’s most beloved institutions, and The Legend of Zelda is one of the world’s most beloved games. So, a film about a legendary (pun fully intended) Zelda speedrunner should’ve been a shoo-in for pickup by a major television network.

And it was. PBS snagged Break the Game, a film about record speedrunner Narcissa Wright, to air as part of its series POV. The series premiered in 1988, and each year airs between 14 and 16 documentaries that “put a human face on contemporary social issues by relating a compelling story in an intimate fashion.” Break the Game was supposed to be the next installment, and was slated to run this month.

But PBS pulled the film because Wright is transgender, director Jane Wagner told Polygon. The network was apparently concerned about backlash, thanks to the Trump government’s notoriously anti-trans stance and its threats against public media organizations.

Wagner says PBS later reneged on its decision and re-slated the film to air in June, but she wasn’t about to let this hiccup stop Break the Game from making its intended April debut.

She just broadcast it on Twitch instead.

Famed Nintendo speedrunner and streamer Trihex hosted an April 21 premiere of Break the Game, airing the documentary in full, along with an after-show Q&A with Wagner and a roundtable with fellow Twitch streamers about representation, mental health, and cyberbullying. (Wright was the subject of regular online bullying, to the extent that she shuttered her own Twitch channel in 2016 to escape it. She later relaunched the channel, but was permabanned by the platform in 2022 after opening graphic content from a viewer on stream, and then tweeting that she wanted to “kill myself and shoot people at the twitch HQ.” She now streams on YouTube.)

Trihex, who has 415,000 followers on Twitch and is known for setting speedrun records in Super Mario and Yoshi games, called Break the Game “the most unapologetic depiction of Twitch culture I’ve ever seen.”

Wagner told Polygon that she always wanted to involve Twitch in Break the Game‘s debut–fittingly, since the documentary contains lots of footage from Wright’s Twitch streams–but PBS said that would violate its licensing agreement. When it pulled Break the Game from the original run date, PBS “changed [its] mind about the Twitch streams,” she said.

PBS may have gone back on its decision and decided to air Break the Game after all, but Wagner is still glad she went ahead with a Twitch premiere.

“Streaming the film on Twitch allows us the opportunity to bypass traditional gatekeepers and directly engage our audience of gaming enthusiasts all around the world without censorship,” she said.

That being said, she worries PBS’s pull was indicative of a “chilling effect” on legacy media caused by the Trump administration.

“My hope is that speaking out about what happened will empower others who have experienced similar situations of censorship to speak up and fight for our collective ability to tell stories that matter,” she said.