Hello again friends. Sorry for the few days without any posts, but the combination of Thanksgiving, Dreamhack, and a cold took a toll on me. Anyhow, I’ll make it up to you with this edition of “Why Your Main Sucks”.

Note- Just because it says “main” in the title doesn’t mean I’m only allowed to talk about the intrinsic qualities of the character. I can and will also talk about the people who main them, the community’s view of the character, and so on. “Why Your Main Sucks” just seemed like a far simpler title than “Why the combination of X character’s frame data, top player representation, and community perception draws my ire”. Make sense? Here’s the 1st edition in case you missed it

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I spent about 20 minutes staring at my laptop trying to think of a comparison for Ganondorf and outside of syphilis nothing really came to mind. Luckily, my own inability to think of one actually helped me figure out why I hate this fucker so much. Ganondorf, between his in-game and out-of-game qualities, manages to encapsulate nearly every single thing I hate about the characters of this game, the people who play the game, and the way people look at the game. For the sake of my sanity and your time, I won’t share all of them though. Instead, I’ll focus on 3 qualities of the character, the players, and the community.

Why Do You Play This Character?

The way I see it there are 3 reasons people play Ganon-

1- For fun

2- To win

3- Because they’re sadomasochists

1&3 may be the same, I’m not sure.

What gets me about them isn’t 1&3 though, because I understand it’s fun to waveland around and stomp on people’s heads. What gets me is #2. This is the Kage branch of Ganon mains. They play to win and want to become the best in the world and decided the best way to accomplish that would be to play as Ganon(?) It just seems a little odd, yanno? Trying to become the best Melee player in the world as a Ganon main is like trying to win the Daytona 500 but instead of driving a race car you just run around the track in a Lightning McQueen costume that your mom made for you the night before.

Like, if you’re out for nothing more than to have fun I understand completely why you would choose to play Ganon. You get to piss people off, turn your enemies purple, and make overly-enthusiastic commentators ejaculate whenever you stomp someone 2 times in 1 string (more on that in a sec). Life doesn’t get much better than that. But I genuinely can’t understand why, if you wholeheartedly want to be the best, you would use Ganon. The only semi-reasonable guess I have is that every Ganon in the Kage branch lives in an alternate reality. That’s really all that I’ve got. An alternate reality in which Ganon is good. A reality in which Ganon’s frame data doesn’t make people cry, where Sheik, Fox, Falco, Falcon, Peach, Marth, and Puff don’t exist, and one where Kage is a genuine warrior.

Speaking of Kage, this is really funny to me-

I think this is the perfect example of what I mean. Kage has been role playing for 10 years and just now decided that Ganon vs Sheik is hopeless. It took a decade. I’m 19 years old, that means for over half my life Kage has been getting chaingrabbed into tilts into death and just now decided enough is enough. Alternate reality.

Anywho, by living in your fantasy world you #1- Make more Ganons exist and #2- Dilute the percentage of sane people at every tournament, on every message board, etc etc, and in the process make everyone else less sane. Every week I see some new post on Reddit or some question on Twitter asking which character has the most developed meta, is the closest to being complete, whatever. Oftentimes the top answer will be Peach which pisses me off to no end, but that’s a topic for another time, but no one will say Ganon, ever (this is an exaggeration, I’m sure someone has said it before.) Lemme share with you all the final frontier of Ganon’s development-

1- Quit sucking balls at chaingrabs

2- Do more slippy slidey things.

That’s it. Delusional Ganon mains have kept the community thinking Ganon has potential while they dismiss a character that does still have a fuckton of potential like Doc as a relic of the past (quit writing off Doc you dickheads.)

Dairing Someone Is Not Disrespect

Game 1 on Battlefield. Ganon vs Peach. Peach flubs a FC nair and gets shield grabbed. The Ganon pummels the Peach once then downthrows and bairs the Peach. They then reset to neutral.

Hard cut to commentators

Commentator #1 has soiled himself. The level of DISRESPECT displayed by that downthrow made him shit himself. He has a very visible erection. Commentator #2 is experiencing cataplexy and is drooling. A third commentator shows up to finish casting the match. “This match is the opposite of that song by Aretha Franklin!” he says. Moments later the Ganon fairs and jabs the Peach’s shield and then after the Peach buffers a roll out they reset back to neutral again.

Hard cut to new commentator

New commentator is inconsolable. He attempts to shake sense back into commentators #1 and #2 as he explains between sobs that nothing will ever match the DISRESPECT he just encountered. The 3 commentators then pass around Jonestown-style Kool-Aid as they decide their lives have peaked and nothing else will ever be worth experiencing again, comparatively.

The Ganon then proceeds to get double 3 stocked

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This is my prediction for matches involving Ganon within 2 years provided commentators/viewers maintain the same pace for how they handle “disrespect”. I have 2 issues with the trend.

#1- You don’t even know what disrespect is anymore.

Not everything Ganon does is disrespect. Stomps are oftentimes the most optimal moves Ganon can use. Down B is not disrespectful. Hell, I once watched a local stream where a Ganon punished a missed rest with an uptilt, literally the most optimal punish. The commentator called it hateful disrespect. Fuck you dude. Disrespect is using a nonoptimal and stylish option deliberately to make your opponent feel bad about themselves. If it’s optimal, doesn’t make the opponent feel bad, and isn’t stylish, then it isn’t disrespectful. Just because it’s Ganon doesn’t make it automatically BM.

#2- Learn how to gauge different levels of disrespect

Hopefully you now know that a forward tilt is not disrespectful. Now is the next test- do you know how to gauge the severity of different forms of disrespect? If you’re most hype commentators/crowd members the answer is likely no. See, we know that jumping offstage to stomp an already dead individual is disrespect. What we likely don’t understand is that you cannot react to an event like that by saying something like “HE JUST SENT HIM TO THE SHADOW REALM WITH THAT HATEFUL DISRESPECT. THAT WAS BASICALLY A GENUINE HATE CRIME IT WAS SO HATEFUL. SOMEONE CALL THE ACLU” because once you’ve done that you’ve cried wolf. What if a Ganon main actually commits a hate crime mid-set now? You can’t tell people to call the ACLU because you wasted that on the off-stage stomp. Good job.

Ya get what I’m saying? People need to learn that there are levels to how they should react to Ganon disrespect, cause the way some people react to a Ganon using an uptilt ought to be saved for how they should react to a Ganon main literally facefucking his opponent’s pet in front of them.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a Ganon main did that eventually. They’re awful people.

But yeah, you get the point. Now that Falcon mains are slowly relearning how to actually accomplish shit Ganon has become the new “disrespect” character which is upsetting because Ganon is a chode. We’ve now created this culture where everything Ganon does is epic disrespect and maybe this is just cynical pissy me, but it’s taken the one redeeming quality of Ganon’s, his ability to do cool shit, and turned it into nothing more than a meme, and a character being reduced to nothing more than a meme is the easiest path to suckdom. So commentators, community members, and Ganon players, please just hear me out here-

Down airs aren’t disrespectful you hunks of smeg.

Ganondorf Makes Me Feel Like Shit

Now I’d like to make something abundantly clear- I very rarely lose to Ganon. Granted I haven’t played many good ones, but the point isn’t if I’m good against Ganon or not, the point is that my hatred for this sewage-skinned C.D Bales-nosed chickenfucker isn’t sour grapes from losing. The reason I hate him is due in large part to the fact that every time I enter a game with a Ganon player and I don’t JV5 them I walk away feeling like I’m bad at the game.

When I get grabbed by Samus out of my shield I don’t feel bad because I got grabbed during a 50/50 where I either continued to pressure Samus and hit her out of the grab or I put up my own shield to protect myself from an Up-B OOS. But when I get hit by a Ganon fair even after seeing the 218 frames of wind-up, even after hearing the “TWUP”, and even after watching him stay in jumpsquat long enough to take a shit on Battlefield, I can’t help but feel like I’ve wasted my life by playing this game. Don’t get me wrong here, I realize a lot of the stuff in this game makes you feel bad, but it’s different with Ganon. When I get waveshined across the stage into an upsmash, I feel bad but I realize that Fox is just really fucking good and my death was something of an inevitability. With Ganon though he just goes “haha” and throws out his huge-ass fist and when I invariably run into it because I’m bad at the game, I teleport into the blast-zone and die AND THERE IS NO WAY FOR ME TO JUSTIFY OR RATIONALIZE IT IN MY HEAD. I just died to a shitty character because I’m shitty at the game and now I feel bad. That’s what he does to you… That’s not the whole issue with it though.

The other component to this issue with Ganon moves from the character itself to the people who main him. Ganon, while shitty, isn’t shitty enough to be a low-tier. He’s got decent matchups against other mid-tiers and the Ice Climbers and therefore is mid-tier in my and just about everyone else’s book. Unfortunately, Ganon mains have a habit of trying to use something I like to call “The Low-Tier Option Select” so that they can downplay their losses and exaggerate the importance of their wins. The LTOS is an option select in the sense that the player makes an input (pressing start while your cursor is on a shitty character) and then from there that input covers 2 options- a win and a loss. By pressing start you get to say “Holy shit I’m so good at this game I won with a shitter like Kirby” or “lol you only won because I play Kirby”, for example, depending on whether you win or lose.

Anyhow, Ganon mains for whatever reason decided they could use the LTOS despite not being low-tier and in the process, they deprive you of any and all pleasure you get from beating them, as well as adding onto the suffering when you lose. If you win, Ganon mains won’t let you use the win to push down the shame you feel for it being so close due to their character being “bad”, but then if you lose you can’t even make yourself feel better by thinking about how good the character you lost to was like you would with Fox because they’ll have to remind you how bad Ganon is and how good they are to have won. They’ve created a bullshit situation where even when you win, you lose. It’s like if you were presented with 1 of 2 options- sleep with a beautiful person and contract syphilis, or don’t sleep with them and get syphilis anyways. (Knew I’d work that in somehow). Great, you beat the Ganon but now you have Melee syphilis. Thanks Ganon mains, you dickheads. No other mid-tier mains feel entitled to using the LTOS, at least not to the extent Ganon mains use it, which means this unwinnable situation is exclusive to the G-Man. You see why I hate this guy now?

P.S- If Ganon mains wanna unfairly use the LTOS then you have every right to use my guide to recovering from syphilis your loss to a low-tier, which can be found right here

Fuck Ganon

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