For a Korean fan, is there anything to be excited about any more?

Every year, Korea wins Riot’s League of Legends World Championship. Every year it becomes a more certain result. At this point, there’s barely any pride left to extract from lifting the Summoner’s Cup. Instead of a glorious triumph, it’s become a quiet affirmation.

However, if there’s still one thing Korea can aspire to, it’s the fulfilment of an embarrassingly glib and puerile fantasy. It’s a fantasy that can only be fulfilled in Poland.

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“We can finish them at the Jin Air level.”

Written years ago by some forgotten Inven shitposter, this phrase was once accepted at face value.

Given Korea’s utter dominance in League of Legends, Korean fans had plenty of right to be confident. But where there’s confidence, there’s also delusion. Through a complex set of mental gymnastics, Korean fans used the success of LCK’s very best teams (the SKT’s, the SSW’s, the three-letter-whoever’s) to vastly overestimate the strength of their league’s dregs and mediocrities.

In recent years, Intel Extreme Masters has served as the brutal reality check that keeps Korean fans humble and international fans sane.

The ROX/GE Tigers were humiliated by China’s World Elite in IEM Season IX. In Season X, North America’s CLG and TSM delivered an emphatic “how does my ass taste?” to Korea by eliminating Jin Air and ESC Ever, respectively. In the current Season XI, Longzhu-IM were gutted by Taiwan’s Flash Wolves.

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“We can finish them at the Jin Air level.”

Those words have long since become a meme to mock Korea’s overconfidence when facing teams from the rest of the World.

In Korea, the hype for the upcoming IEM tournament is low. The two LCK teams heading to the IEM Season XI World Championship in Katowice, Poland, suggest that Korean fans should stay grounded. Kongdoo Monster — a team that has already suffered relegation from LCK in 2016 — are threatened with the same fate as they sit in last place with a 1–7 record. The ROX Tigers are just one game better at 2–6, and sit just outside the relegation zone in eighth place.

Everything suggests the Korean fans should stay grounded and disinterested. Korean columnists — typically marked by their insipid, inoffensive attitudes — are comfortable writing about the weak field at IEM Katowice and the tournament’s dwindling prestige.

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“We can finish them at the Jin Air level.”

And yet, a faint trace of intrigue still lingers in the air, enticing everyone to gather and watch. It’s what makes OnGameNet still broadcast every single game, forces all the Korean media to write their preview columns, and brings Korean fans to the forums to ask about the foreign teams they’ve watched zero minutes of in 2017.

It’s an intrigue that comes from a demented place inside the heart, that knows the greatest joy in competition isn’t in being proven to be the best, but rather is in humiliating one’s opponents. It’s the allure of a victory that’s more sadistically sweet than winning Riot’s World Championship. It’s the hope that the meme won’t just be a dream.

If fans from all around the world are feeling a strange sense of unease, that’s just natural. They may know that several non-Korean teams have dropped out on short notice, and that they’ll have no shortage of excuses to try and explain away any result. But they also know, no matter the excuses, no matter the rationalizations, that there’s no escaping the symbolism of the ultimate defeat.

“We beat your best with our worst.”

Or,

“We beat you with our Jin Airs.”

For once, Korea has everything to gain, and the rest of the world has everything to lose.