You’d think this would be a straightforward crime to interpret. A woman, Emily Javier, is fed up with her boyfriend, Alex Lovell, who spends all of his time playing video games, and further, she suspects he’s been cheating on her. So she buys a samurai sword, tapes it to the side of their bed, and in the middle of the night, while he’s sleeping, starts hacking him up.

At this point, I’m thinking she’s a terrible violent person, she deserves to have the book thrown at her, what a ghastly crime. But then the boyfriend, who did survive with some serious injuries, opened his mouth.

When police did arrive at the scene on March 3, they found Lovell curled up in the blood-spattered bedroom, according to the probable cause affidavit filed by police in Camas, a Washington state town northeast of Portland, Ore. Remarkably, he survived the attack despite serious injuries. Lovell almost lost the index, middle and ring fingers on his hand. But in interviews this week, the competitive gamer sounded happy to be alive. “I was just so proud for beating this samurai wannabe crazy lady with hate in her heart,” the 29-year-old told the Oregonian/OregonLive. “I’ve been preparing my whole life for something like this.” Javier — who pleaded not guilty this week to first-degree attempted murder, according to the Columbian — had also allegedly been preparing. Alex Lovell — known as “Biggie” in his local gamer scene — is an avid player of “PlayerUnknown’s Battleground,” a multiplayer online fighting game. As he told the Oregonian/OregonLive, Lovell has been recently logging 12 to 13 hours a day playing the game. The regimen also required “exercises for his hands, wrists and shoulders and also practicing mouse moves and techniques to maximize performance,” the paper reported. “I wasn’t a sweaty nerd, more of an Ethlete,” Lovell told the Oregonian/OregonLive.

And with that, I changed my verdict and started thinking it was more of a justifiable attempted homicide. They better keep me off the jury.

Yes, you’re all right. That last line was making light of what was done to Lovell, which he did not deserve at all, no matter how smug he seems. I apologize for a bad joke.