So Ukranian progamer Kas was disqualified from a tournament earlier for tweeting that he was "going to rape some girl soon" in said tournament. His opponent was Maddelisk, who is one of the few well-known female progamers in Starcraft 2. I view the decision as justified. It was an incredibly stupid thing to say as a pro-gamer, when referencing an actual female opponent. That's pretty horrifying. I also believe the tweet was in jest, even if incredibly poorly worded, "rape" has been used as gamer-slang for "defeat soundly" for a long time, the vast majority of uses are from one male to another male. It's a hard thing to defend honestly, though I've always believed that intent is 9/10ths of all offense when it comes to harsh language, it's still something that is not pleasant to hear. It's oddly specific, too much so.



There was an event where an analyst used it to describe one player beating another a couple of years ago in SC2. The fact that I remember it is due to how rare it was to hear that word used in the context of eSports as a profession. You just don't do it, the same reason you don't go and call someone "fag" in public though you might jokingly do it between friends, it's just going to get taken the wrong way regardless of what you intended. In this case, the fact that he said it to a woman is even more egregious. I mean what do we need a manual for progamers that says "yeah so maybe don't say you're going to rape your female opponent on twitter"? Common bloody sense surely. I think Kas is a big dumb idiot. I don't think he intended offense but it was the fairly obvious result. I mean come on, I'm all for trashtalking between opponents regardless of gender. It's a competitive scene, if you want to compete you've gotta be able to give and take a bit of trash-talk, but really, we have so few female progamers in SC2, could we try not to maybe say awful things to them?



It's not like I'm asking for special privileges, I'm asking that progamers act like professionals, at least to some degree. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence. That applies to everyone. He said a stupid stupid thing and got punished for it. Sounds reasonable to me. Dumb shit like this happens in other sports to. That's not an excuse. Try to be better than that. So I mean y'know, maybe don't say you're going to rape someone over twitter? That sounds like a good idea, right? Maybe we do need that manual.