Unpopular Opinion Time: I'm Tired of Hearing About the "Real Smash Community"

Smash is changing, Smash is evolving. In my short 4 and change years in smash, I've witnessed a massive shift from grassroots to esports that I'm sure is an even bigger shock to my seniors. I never would have foreseen going from carrying TVs on the subway for basement locals to flying to an event of thousand of attendees in Las Vegas. I never would have expected to go from posting memes in the Ontario Social thread on Smashboards to getting a lenny face in my name on a subreddit nearing 200,000 subscribers. I never imagined seeing my very own friends go from crashing on my apartment floor after a long, cramped carpool ride, to being able to make this game into a full-time living. And did any of us anticipate Melee becoming the nerd's answer to WWE? This community has always been something special, and it just keeps growing.



Now, hold on a second: what do I mean by "this community"? The Southern Ontario community? The Melee community? The /r/smashbros community? Someone's Twitch following? No, of course not, none of those would make any sense. I mean the *Smash* community.



But wait, *what* Smash community? Is there even such a thing? A lot of people around here would have you believe not -- in their minds, there is such a thing as a "real smash community" that is a subset of all Smash players (leaving the rest to be what, the fake smash community?). Think about how utterly ridiculous that sounds when you say it out loud. I'd like to say a few words about this disconcertingly common opinion.



(Full disclosure: I was first made aware of the smash community after attending a tournament in February 2011. I did not discover competitive Smash via any online gateway. I am now a tournament organizer and participant in several community efforts.‎ My relationship with smash has been a considerably complex one, but that's a story for another day.)



From what I've seen of the countless times this silliness has been stated and upvoted on /r/smashbros, the reasoning seems to be twofold: being that a) some people hold more power and leverage than others, and b) people are much more agreeable in real life than they are online. As in, two life lessons that most of us figured out either in elementary school or during our first day using the internet, and are in no way unique to Smash. Somewhere along the line, enough people got the idea that applying these blatantly obvious truisms to a microcosm is a trustworthy way of judging who is and is not worthy of community membership (which really only required you to *enjoy at least one of the games* and interact with others who do the same).



As if drawing a line like that wasn't based in flimsy enough reasoning, it's also worth noting that those who choose to define a "real community" always *suspiciously* seem to do it in a way tailored to their own inclusion. Did you go 0-2 in bracket pools at your first tournament last weekend? Well, by gosh, it would only make sense to further define that line as the ever-popular litmus test of "people who go to tournaments", which you can do safely now that it officially includes yourself! Never mind that such a requirement is disingenuous when you consider just how much Smash has grown as a monolith beyond the sum of grassroots events. We have convenient ways of keeping up with metagames and narratives via news outlets like the front page of Smashboards. People who live in remote areas, no matter which Smash game is their favourite, can find opponents thanks to the advent of netplay and wifi. We can tune in to watch gameplay on Twitch channels as if it was our own private television service. Are the people who make these things happen, like news writers, wifi and netplay code developers, and streamers, often by virtue of living in conditions where they can't regularly attend offline events, considered less a part of the community than some guy who went to #10 on the PR's house once to watch other people play at a smashfest? Online media is very much a mainstream form of communication now for people who may or may not already know each other offline, and communities centred around convenient online communication methods are very much blended to include those who would otherwise not have access to other Smash players. There is very much a "real smash community", but it happens to include the entire online and offline spheres as a continuous entity. "Real" is not a synonym for "console", nostalgia aside, and naming a certain part of the community as the "real" one has very different implications from naming it something more objective, like the "tournament community".



To expand further on why tournament attendance is a bad requirement for "realness", the "/r/smashbros isn't the real community, 50% of them don't go to tournaments!" crowd fail to realize that every single one of these "cancerous" community members is not magically banned from ever going to tournaments. These people grow up, move away to college in a big city, get their first cars, come across various means which enable them to start going to offline events. And then, people don't rid themselves of their terrible opinions and poor judgment skills the moment they pay venue fee for the first time. They may hide it better without anonymity, yes, but bad behaviour moves from offline to online via those who never knew any better. Entitled attitudes online become unrealistic demands at tournaments. For every person you see complaining and acting entitled online, for every one you dismiss as "probably doesn't even go to tournaments", you're wrong on about half of them. Do those sound like good odds?



So what should we do? Come up with a better litmus test, or just do a better job at influencing the all-inclusive Smash scene? The sensible answer would be to lead by example. Overswarm suggested voicing your discontent toward negativity and entitlement via downvotes. You also have the power of arguing back with your own words. You can timeout problem users in stream chats if you have mod powers. You can also set a good example by doing what you want others to do. But do you know what's even easier than all of that? Claiming that the negative nancies are not the "real community", thereby implying that you're not like "those other" smashers, since you know what the *real* community is (which just so happens to include yourself by coincidence, honest). Forget leading by example, that takes effort! Dissociation is much easier. Except for the part where it's useless at best and detrimental at worst. There are no onlooking prospective players, media outlets, sponsors, nor stakeholders who are interested in learning what anyone's opinion on the "real community" vs the (fake community?) is after getting a bad first impression from the most accessible entry points into Smash. Crappy attitudes are multiplying, and they're not going to be curbed by essentially turning yourself into a bystander.



When you attempt to draw a line in the sand to separate the "real" smash community from everyone else, it's more often than not a thinly veiled attempt at self-elevation. It's simply congratulating one's self in front of an audience for having attended at least one tournament, and trying to convince readers (who probably didn't even read the speaker's username to begin with) of the *very important* postulation that the speaker is better than stream monsters and reddit shitposters (gosh, that's one hell of an accomplishment). It at best does nothing to improve the community atmosphere, and is wholly ineffective at improving the community's public image, and is instead a self-serving act. Which is unfortunately ironic for an attempted declaration of allegiance to a "real" smash community...

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