If you shit in my mailbox, I don't want you in my community

Life is hard.

News flash, I know, but still: seriously think about that shit for a second. Life is HARD. If you live in a city, rent is too high. If you live in the country, jobs are too scarce. If you're young, you're broke; if you're old, you're broken. If you live in Cleveland, probably all of those things are true.

But that's part of what makes the FGC so goddamn amazing. Nobody in the FGC asks anybody else to do anything easy. Streamers end up in random hotels with shitty wifi, and then we make them stream off their phones. Tournament organizers have to deal with total fucking chaos every waking moment for days on end. Arcade owners are basically trying to break the tide of history at this point. And then, of course, there are the players. Oh, the players.

Let's start with Save. You heard about Save, right? Check it out:
This guy WENT INTO DEBT to compete. With no sponsorship, using his own money, he flew to Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, SoCal, Taipei, and Vegas. I know people who are too cheap to go to ONE of those places ON VACATION, let alone to go to all of them in the pursuit of a dream.


And he's not the only one. Xian's start in the FGC was just as rough.
"He slept on the floor of a hall in the tournament arena and, for three days, did not shower because there was 'just the bathroom, and it wasn't really a shower room.'

On the last day, he met Team Titans, Singapore's well-travelled competitors in the Counter-Strike game. 'I looked really haggard … and they offered me a bed and their hotel to shower, and I was really happy,' shared Mr Ho."
This is why forums like r/kappa and r/salty step up to sponsor players. It's why players like Justin Wong and NuckleDu do the same thing, not to mention why people open their homes to visiting competitors from other cities and countries. Because life is hard, and life in the FGC is even harder, and that's what a community is for: to make life easier.

Which brings us to ZeRo.
"For 13 minutes, Gonzalo 'Zero' Barrios' face barely moved. It was the Grand Finals match of a Super Smash Bros. Wii U tournament, and Barrios, the best Smash player in the world, was squaring off against a formidable opponent. A few feet away, Barrios' bodyguard kept a lookout for a man who'd threatened to be there, in wait, with a gun aimed at the champion gamer...

A few days prior to the September, 2016 tournament, Barrios had read an Instagram comment that shook him. The anonymous commenter threatened to go to the Santa Ana esports arena with a gun and put a bullet through Barrios...

All told, Barrios estimates he's received ten death threats."
Look, you don't have to like ZeRo. You don't have to like the way he plays, you don't have to like his scarf, you don't have to like what he says. Shit, I don't like Diddy Kong myself! I play Bowser, a mid-tier gimmick character, and it drives me fucking NUTS when I have to play against well-rounded, top-tier picks like Diddy. Everybody's entitled to their opinion. But don't act like ZeRo doesn't belong here. Life is hard and life in the FGC is harder. Just because ZeRo wins a bunch doesn't mean he's the exception to the rule:
"Barrios left Chile to live with a Smash buddy in Philadelphia, carving out a home in the family’s basement in exchange for $50 a month. One or two tournaments' worth of winnings would supply him with some semblance of a life in the States on a shoestring budget.

'I didn't have the money to fly,' Barrios said. 'If I had to take a Megabus to go to New York for a local tournament, to Boston, I'd do that; to Utah, I'd do that, too. 12 hours to go somewhere, wait another few hours there, take a 12-hour bus to somewhere else.' Without phone or internet, Barrios would print out maps at local libraries or siphon wi-fi at a local McDonald's, making seat-of-his-pants plans with strangers who, hopefully, would pick him up on time."
If you can't respect his character choice or his playstyle or his fashion sense or his persona, fine. But at least you have to respect the work. Without the work, there is no FGC. Without the work, people like Sp00ky never bother to put up with the shitheads who keep fucking with their equipment and then we don't have streams. Without the work, people like Big E see that their tournaments aren't making money and then we don't have events. Without the work, people like your favorite player - and I don't care WHO your favorite player is, this applies to all of them - don't even bother to come out and then we don't have a community at all.

So, listen, you don't have to be a ZeRo fan. But if you fucking THREATEN HIS LIFE, you don't belong in here. Period. We just don't need that - life is already too hard. So before you make it even worse, try taking just one percent of that energy and putting it into making someone's life easier. The FGC will always have fighting games, so you don't have to worry about the FG. It's the C part that counts. Don't fuck it up.

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