Years of Research

This is what I’ve put together from all my time in the Smash community. This has happened over and over again from Brawl/Melee/PM -> Smash 4/Melee -> Ultimate/Melee.



Evo Donation Drive:



This was during the era where Brawl and Melee were on fair terms. Level of toxicity was extremely low. At this time it made the most sense for the entire community to only donate towards one smash game to get into Evo instead of splitting it up. So the Smash community as a whole got Melee into Evo. As Melee grew from this a noticeable amount of toxicity began to rise from within the Melee community and they began to trash talk the Brawl community.



Stream Chats:



The number of “random toxic Melee elitists” began to rise and this hate spread through to stream chats. Usually comments were “Brawl sucks. When’s Melee?” The amount of these comments were still infrequent at the time. I didn’t pay much attention to this until later.



“Forbidden game”:



PM was the best smash game to most during this era as it brought both Melee and Brawl communities together to play one game. However PM gained a lot of power and, just like Melee, did not like competition. So tournament streams for Brawl gained a big increase of hate for not being PM or Melee while everyone fought each other.



Outbursts in Public:



During Apex 2014 the Melee community began cheering for Melee during the award ceremony for Brawl. This continued into Smash 4 at Apex 2015 and many Smash 4 finals had similar treatment. This was not limited to Smash events, as Melee has been noted for doing this at major FGC events as well.



Fast forward to Smash 4:



PM ceases development. Brawl dies and some transfer over to Smash 4. Melee players decide to “give the game a chance” by proceeding to say “it’s not Melee” and move on back to their game. For some majors featuring both games if Smash 4 Top 8 was first the Melee crowd would boo the game as mentioned previously. This toxicity would transfer over to Twitch chat as well so they could flank us on both fronts.



The Ultimate Showdown:



It took me a long time to piece together a proper understanding of why this keeps happening throughout each Smash game. Melee has continued being toxic towards anything not Melee. There were Melee streams I watched with “BIG NAMES” that had their own mini fan bases. What I learned by watching those is that “BIG NAMES” controlled the masses— the Twitch chat, the viewer counts, the in-person crowds. They have the power over that. They created that Melee community. It was all the years of petty words and using the Smash community as a whole to become as big as they are now. It has gotten to the point where it doesn’t matter what they do anymore. It’s whatever they say goes, and no one will stand up to them, right or wrong, because they’re scared.



Grass Roots or Esports? Make up your minds



Melee tends to support grass roots events. They even managed to SOMEHOW tell Nintendo to back off when they got involved to shut down the Evo 2013 Melee stream. This is a confusing gray area because they want Nintendo support too? But only for the Melee community, not the Smash community as a whole. Some Melee players have even publicly said they don’t need Nintendo and Melee can support itself like it has been doing for years. All of this makes no sense and it’s hard to say whether they want to be esports or grass roots.



But one thing is for certain— there are key people who clearly show they don’t care about anything but Melee. Like Leffen and Mango for example.



Leffen is someone who always stirs up drama and needlessly fights instead of staying in his own lane. He’s even been BANNED for this in the past. He’s always someone who immediately trashes TOs and tournaments all the time, giving Smash players a bad name. Though people ridicule him for these types of things here and there he always gets back to it because nobody actually cares what he does since he’s a top Melee player. If he wants to trash on the entire universe people just move on while he tries to make excuses for himself for all the dumb things he’s done to the whole community. This gets wilder when you remember that he has a fanbase that grows with his nonsense when he really should be the one getting the back burner.



Mango is someone who constantly drinks and does whatever he wants and doesn’t care about anything. People like him are extremely dangerous. During the Smash Ultimate Invitational some Smash players were scared of what he would do at the Invitational— more so even when he made a tweet saying he isn’t gonna be invited back. He took pleasure in giving the idea that he did something wild that could have destroyed everything. Why should anyone allow this history of recklessness? But it gets a pass because Melee said so.



Corrections:



When I say the Melee community and the Smash community are separate? I mean that the entire Smash community is clearly divided into two separate groups. We have been separated ever since the Evo donation. I do not mean the entire Melee community is toxic, but it does have a history of bashing other communities and that needs to be acknowledged properly.



Obviously there are different types of Melee players who are just fans of their own game but do not bother or trash other games. They coexist with other communities in general and some even help out other games. There’s some Melee players that stay to watch streams of other games before or after Melee. This is what I mean by being part of the Smash community. I do not have any problems with Melee fans like this. If anything I’m sorry for not correcting my statements earlier.



The “Melee community” would not care about these things. They would trash everything and everyone and just yell “MELEE IS THE GREATEST GAME OF ALL TIME!” Those types of people are the real problem.



I have no problem with Melee players playing Ultimate. However, I do care about the POSSIBILITY of them using another Smash game to just grow their own community and THEN trash the other in one go WHILE I watch this repeating pattern. I have a problem with people not controlling their fanbase because they just don’t care or know what they’re doing. Yes there is a chance they are here to actually play the game and treat it as a equal Smash game but history shows us this is not the case over and over again.



Closing Statement:



I did not mean for this to further divide the Smash community. I apologize for snapping at so many top Melee players when I only have issues with a few. I only noticed that history was starting to repeat itself again, for the third consecutive Smash game in a row. Ultimate seems to be the game to finally get us all together behind one title and I would hate to have a few bad eggs return the Smash community back to “us vs them” six months after release for the third time in a row. If anyone has a problem with that, see me in bracket.



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