What is Hire Fans Lol?

Hire Fans Lol is a copypasta and image meme that pairs an unedited screenshot of a video game character with a fan-made edit meant to make the character more attractive, with the joke being that the edit typically looks worse than the original.

Where did Hire Fans Lol come from?

It started on May 29, 2021, when X user @ApexAlphaJ posted a since-deleted tweet with two images of Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn and the line "Pic from the game on the left, fan made on right. Hire fans lol".

What does Hire Fans Lol mean?

The caption sets up the punchline that fans think they can redesign game characters better than the developers, when the fan edit almost always looks plastic, off, or worse than the source material.

How do you use Hire Fans Lol?

People pair a screenshot from a game with a heavily edited version of the same character and post the two side by side with the caption "Pic from the game on the left, fan made on the right. Hire fans lol," as seen in @CerberusXt's viral Ciri edit.

Is Hire Fans Lol still popular?

The copypasta had a major revival in December 2024 after The Witcher 4 was revealed with a new-look Ciri, with edits of Ciri, Geralt, and Astarion racking up hundreds of thousands of likes across X and Reddit.

Hire Fans Lol

2021copypastasemi-active

Published August 12, 2026

Hire Fans Lol is a gaming copypasta where a screenshot of a video game character sits next to a fan-made edit meant to look prettier, with the punchline being that the edit usually looks worse. It started in May 2021 with a tweet about Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn and roared back in December 2024 after The Witcher 4 was announced.

gaming copypasta memes two panel memes character design memes fandom discourse memes

Overview

The "Hire Fans Lol" copypasta shows two versions of a video game character side by side, the original next to a fan-made edit meant to look more glamorous, with the caption "Pic from the game on the left, fan made on the right. Hire fans lol"5. The punchline is that the "improved" version usually looks stranger, more plastic, or straight-up worse than what the game's developers actually made.

The joke plugs into ongoing gaming Twitter arguments about how female characters and other leads are designed in modern games. It was born earnest, echoing the 2021 tweet that started it all1, but is now flipped just as often to mock how bad those "fan improvements" actually look.

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Origin & Background

Platform

X (Twitter); revived on X and Reddit in late 2024

Creator

@ApexAlphaJ

Date

2021

On May 29, 2021, X user @ApexAlphaJ1 posted a now-deleted tweet with two side-by-side images of Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn, at a moment when the character was catching heat online for supposedly looking too plain. The caption ranted about Sony making its lead women look "masculine as hell" and ended with the line that would become the copypasta: "Pic from the game on the left, fan made on right. Hire fans lol." The poster later said the tweet was meant satirically5.

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How It Spread

The copypasta caught on within a day. On May 30, 2021, X user @Voltaic1172 flipped the format with two images of Patrick Star, one normal and one absurdly polished, pulling more than 25,000 likes over the next few years.

The joke sat mostly dormant until December 12, 2024, when The Witcher 4 and Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet were revealed at The Game Awards, and both games' leads immediately caught flak over their looks5. On December 13, X user @CerberusXt3 posted a glamorized edit of Ciri under the caption "Hire fans lol," hitting over 8,300 likes in four days. That same day, Twitch streamer @DenimsTV4 posted another Ciri edit using the full copypasta and cleared 15,000 likes.

On December 15, X user @outstarwalker6 applied the joke to Astarion from Baldur's Gate 3, pulling over 8,200 likes. That same day, X user @mvdpire7 edited Geralt from The Witcher 3 for over 30,000 likes, and X user @ChronoKatie8 posted another Geralt version that was reposted to r/gamingmemes9, hitting 243,000 likes on X and 540 upvotes on the subreddit in two days.

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How to Use This Meme

To use "Hire Fans Lol," people typically post two images of a video game character side by side, one screenshot from the actual game and one fan edit that pushes the face toward a conventional glamour-shot look. The common caption is "Pic from the game on the left, fan made on the right. Hire fans lol." The joke works both earnestly, arguing devs should have made the character prettier, and ironically, pointing out that the fan version somehow looks worse.