Rm8 and The Crowd

At Major Smash Pros Tournament BOBC5, the best player in Alberta, 18 years old, flew across the country to attend the tournament and experienced some of the most vicious widespread loud visceral hatred from a crowd I have ever seen. 

Most would say he brought it upon himself. He isn’t particularly liked. He probably said something about Transgenders. He’s clearly autistic, like, in the pre-2020 way, the genetic way, and this manifests in many people having suffered negative, “rude” experiences with him. I’ve played him myself. I can see it. 

But the way he brought this particularly loud, world-encompassing storm of vitriol upon himself was by complaining on twitter about the match he was seeded to play in the tournament. 

"Thanks to biased pandering by the B.C crowd, they have reverted the seeds so I play Niko4 again."

Yes it is funny. The phrase “biased pandering by the BC crowd” is meme-worthy. Twitter Comedians made an image using his quote that made me laugh. 

And so at the tournament, Rm8 would lose his projected winners match, and so would Niko4, so they would play in losers to make it out of pools, on stream, in front of a wild, screaming Friday night crowd in BC. 

It was the most one sided crowd I’ve ever felt. People really audibly fucking hated this guy. Or at least they sounded like it. And he felt it. In the first game, which he practically threw in about a minute (granted, it’s Kazuya), he did not hit his opponent once. It was a JV4. This does not happen in high-level competitive smash, at all. 

The guy was not wearing head phones. I could not believe it.

Rm8 won the next game. I was the only one cheering for him. Ike is very simple, and seems to require little creativity (like Kazuya), but it was still shocking to see the kid keep his composure in spite of it all. 

And he’s on his way to winning game 3 too, but then he’s at 0 on his last stock Vs. Kazuya at 140, so you can probably guess what happened next. He eventually gets hit with Up Smash Out of Shield at 80 and dies and people lose their minds. Like it was scripted. Droves of young men rush the players to obnoxiously congratulate Kazuya Player 846 and Rm8 storms off looking extremely upset. 

GF and I are sitting in the crowd, pretty close to the front, watching all this, sober, both feeling that this isn’t as epic as many of the people here think it is, and walk away unsatisfied. 

I don’t care what rm8 has said to anybody. If he’s not ‘toxic’ enough to be banned from tournaments, he’s not toxic enough to have to hear hundreds of people screaming hatred at him for complaining about fighting a Kazuya to make it out of pools. You're allowed to complain about shit. 

They postponed the match too, until all the other streamed sets were done, so this match could be front and center, so everyone, all at once, could yell and hoot and holler and mock this autistic young man who traveled thousands of miles across Canada to compete in the game we love. 

I went around a bit afterwards, casually polling people about whether or not they felt bad for Rm8, and almost nobody did. No empathy for that guy who just got shamed and screamed and mocked by what must have felt like everyone in the whole world. 

It horrifies me to see that people actually derived serious pleasure, like a kind of catharsis, from seeing him so widely ridiculed and defeated. Like a tar and feathering. Like a lynching. 

Can you imagine? Can you remember how it feels to be rejected, even in a small way? Can you remember how it felt to be bullied in school? I can’t even take people wholesomely cheering for their friend who happens to be fighting me. Even a couple “Lets go’s” from my opponent’s crowd completely removes me from the game. That’s why i wear ear plugs and noise canceling headphones and drown everything out with violent wet BROWN NOISE on Spotify and look like a fucking monster walking through the venue mid-bracket.  

I don’t know. Rm8 isn’t me. No one’s experience is really knowable. I saw him smiling talking to someone maybe 20 minutes later. That’s more than I was able to muster after my own performance at Battle of BC 5.