Everyone is flailing and showering Dyrus with praise about this “apology” that he made at IPL when being interviewed after TeamShitheadMid’s win at IPL4. People are talking about how “brave” it was and other ridiculous crap.

Let’s get one thing out here right now: Doing the right thing is not brave, nor is it praise worthy. Apologizing for being a shitty human being and a rape apologist isn’t praise-worthy - it’s a first step towards actually not being a shitty human being and a rape apologist. IF it comes with an actual attitude change, then that’s good, but you don’t get to be patted on the head and told that you’re a Good Man for doing what you should be doing to begin with (i.e. not using rape as an epithet).

If anyone is “brave” in the situation, it would be the fan that confronted Dyrus about it - one only has to look as far as Reddit (though that’s not a good example, Reddit is almost without exception a misogynistic shithole) or other places to see how quickly people will dogpile on people who call a celebrity to task. Look at the SC2 community and Destiny, look at the LoL community and Dyrus/HotshotGG, hell, even look at the Chris Brown/Rhianna incident. The littany of “chris can beat me any time” nonsense on Twitter (and “dyrus can rape me anytime!” nonsense on the Tumblr league tag, for that matter) was disgusting. The trope commonly goes that “all it takes for evil to succeed is for good to do nothing”, and that’s what happens. These “celebrities” are not called to task for their reprehensible acts, and they’re allowed to think that it’s okay to act that way when it’s anything but, and then get coddled when they DO get called out and the people that call them out get ostracized? Give me a fucking break.

Now, far be it for me to try and pin the entirety of someone’s personality on one flaw - hell, that happens to me. The issue, though, is that these people - like it or not - are role models to their communities. League players look up to these players and see them do things like rage at their teammates for their own mistakes (TheOddOne, HotshotGG), use rape as an epithet and propagate rape culture/misogyny (HotshotGG, Dyrus), and this sort of malignant behavior spreads through the community because “well the pros do it, so it’s fine”. Combine with lackadaisical enforcement of the Summoner’s Code from Riot (and other actions that show they’re okay with the misogyny), and you get the sort of community that almost everyone lambastes League for but doesn’t do anything to try and mitigate or cure.

If he wants to apologize, he needs to show it. He needs to step up and not just reform his own behavior, he needs to call out his peers. But that’s unlikely - after all, “if you don’t like that [I] won, you can buy a ‘u mad bro?’ shirt on teamsolomid”, duh.