Hello, fellow degenerates. I’m Osmiridium, a shitlord from South Jersey for those of you who want to pick me up in a panel van one day. As a Falcon main, I found it completely necessary and oddly cathartic to write an article that bashes my poor life decisions. Shitposting is probably one of the least healthy methods of therapy I can think of barring a frontal lobotomy, but while I still have thoughts that you can point and laugh at, I might as well put them into words.

Judging by the fact that you’re on the finest Melee shitpost archive known to the galaxy, you too were once a pre-pubescent esports masturbator. I’m also positive that at one point in your life, whether a spectator or a player, it only took one combo video for you to conclude that Captain Falcon was the BEST character in the game, at least until you discovered the tier list. After all, what’s not cool about a racing Japanese bodybuilder who runs fast, wears spandex, and has a kneecap made out of a car battery? He is an enigmatic, combo-dispensing memelord who performs flashy acrobatics while simultaneously being retarded. He air wobbles every character in the game and can potentially zero to death people off of a stray dair and one or two missed techs, he shouts obnoxiously while throwing out his signature move which can be seen coming from three years in the future, and is known for having the greatest and most dangerous nipples in all the land.

Honestly, you can’t blame people for finding him cool. Thanks to this fuckass 20XX movement, more spectators than ever just want see a major tournament that isn’t two furries going pew-pew at each other or a flying tumor that pokes things. Therefore, I can understand people who look to The Capn’ for some entertainment. I cannot, however, justify the fact that people seem to expect him to live up to his hype with a recovery that most of the cast can edgeguard with their eyes closed. The only children who still think he’s an invulnerable swagmaster are those who haven’t yet seen him get edgeguarded to death by a Marth who mashed down tilt 301 times, or Project M players.

Placing your bets on Falcon is like studying your finals for a single night after not having slept for 2 days and pounding a Red Bull. You know it’s not going to work, but you trick yourself into thinking that it’s worth the effort anyways. Sure, he’s flashy and does potentially have the touch of death, but even the finest Falcon players in the world can’t always land the S2J stocks necessary to make Falcon’s persona any more than a fantasy. The most tragic part is that there are players who willingly indulge a false hope based solely around hype and style, those who would punt a baby into the ocean before admitting that Captain Falcon is an inferior character to some furries, a ninja, and eskimos with hammers.

To explain this properly, we must first wavedash back and examine a popular theme: How lame a character is. What makes a character lame in comparison to a cool one? There’s no definite answer, but it can be guaranteed that your opinion is incorrect. In the judgement of rational people, a character is the sum of their parts, no matter how shitty or overpowered those parts are. It’s easy to pretend that there’s only one character who’s really cool, that Fox requires the most inputs and is therefore more swag than everyone, or that because a character relies on a specific combo, they are grimy and lame. But for better or for worse, all characters are bound to their hexadecimal values which do no more or less no matter how hard you scream at your CRT. Nobody is cool, since cool is based on your shitty opinion.

What some people seem to think is that due to a certain character’s preferred method of building damage or slamming people into the blast zone, they are lame or cool because of it. A well known example is Sheik, often classified as critically high on the lame-o-meter. What makes Sheik uncool? The most common answer I get it “tech chasing and f-tilt fair,” usually conveyed through screeching. This alone causes many to ostracize Sheik from realm of the cool kids due to the ease of her tech and her distinct lack of flashiness. Admittedly, each tech chase and f-tilt fair that takes my stock brings me one day closer to a massive brain aneurysm, and Sheik combo videos are about as fun as watching a documentary on how pencils are made, but it seems odd that when a Falcon grabs a Sheik near the ledge and back airs/dropzones/whatever, you can bet your venue fee that it’ll show up on a highlight reel or Pornhub feature.

The thing is, Captain Falcon is another side of the same grime-smeared coin. His dair functions the same as Sheik’s f-tilt and has even more hitstun, in addition to being an aerial on a character who moves with the speed of a teenager shutting their laptop in time for their parents to not see them watching cartoon porn. Falcon tech chases with the same directional throw as Sheik, his recovery is similarly shitty, he has a finisher/combo forward air, both character’s players tend to assume that they’re the worst high tier, ad infinitum. Of course, both continue to fight as though they’re the hottest shit since Apollo dropped his first mixtape on Pompeii. Every character hates every other character no matter the matchup, but at least Sheiks usually figure out at some point that they’re boring to watch, and continue doing their thing anyways in order to win, which is perfectly fine.

On the other hand, Falcons will talk about “that one X player” that they swagged on until you kill them or yourself in a fit of homicidal rage, but whenever they get poked offstage or tech chased into a combo, suddenly their first name is John and Falcon is once again in the same tier as Pichu and Hungrybox’s Fox. Falcons believe that their character is so cool and so fucking awesome until they begin losing, at which point they blame both their garbage character and the opposition’s tier (or jankiness) advantage. Seriously, what the fuck, guys? It’s even dumber than LTOS from Ganon players, because at least he’s actually shit.

Ganon walks with the authority of an obese Craiglist dominatrix, and yet in an ironic metaphor, the undeniably swole Falcon’s walking animation is a pitiful limp. This alludes to the fact that fucking Ganon mains are more willing to admit their weaknesses than Falcon’s. In fact, if you just go to your local S&M dungeon, you can probably ask the first twink you see with a cat o’ nine tails in his ass and he’ll admit that he knows that Ganon’s bad, and doesn’t play him just to win. Falcon, on the other hand, seems to inspire the most fascinating of delusions in people, one such being that he should able to win through sheer force of will in the absence of the player actually being good at Melee. It’s a common occurrence in these miserable folk who are otherwise mentally unable to cope with the fact that they have only three options in neutral and can get gimped by Winslow, the one handed war veteran who lives in their garage and eats stray cats.

The only way to teach these lost souls their lesson is to beat it into them, and relentlessly so. The easiest ways to beat a bad Falcon include outspacing or shielding their aerial approaches, baiting out grabs, and telling them that they totally can’t land a Falcon Punch in neutral. Once they’ve had their ass properly handed to them (assuming you haven’t been sent to the Shadow Realm by a mouthbreathing frat boy,) they have two options: Acknowledge that they were outplayed or outdone in some aspect, move on with life, and continue to play as Falcon, or switch to another character since they’d rather not deal with his flaws.

Or they could just bitch, moan, and make excuses for it, which is the reason everyone hates these dickbrains.

In the case of the swaglord Falcon, it becomes a vicious cycle. They lose, blame other characters/their shitty character until they believe that they’re the best again, and then return to practicing moonwalk knees, Tapion combos, and other needless shit instead of SHFFLing, neutral game, and out of shield options. This mentality cripples future improvement and often bars potentially decent players from becoming more than very obnoxious sandbags.

It seems the only way to cure “swag syndrome” is for the player to make a sobering realization — all characters suck and suck less in their very own special ways (except for Fox, he’s an option-whoring fuckboy). By playing a character and striving to win as them, you must accept their strengths and weaknesses as your own burden to bear. Sure, it would be better if shine didn’t exist, or Falcon had a beer helmet, or if Marth’s animations made him look less like a sassy white girl, but wishful thinking gets you nowhere. Falcon and his players will never improve so long as people attempt to play him as they see his swaggy persona.

Remember, kids — the only place mindless approaching dairs, stupid tech chase reads, and ‘swag’ in neutral will get Falcon is offstage. Sure, you may eventually get to make a fifteen second combo video out of the one or two stocks it actually works, but the rest are going to be in everyone else’s.

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