Low-Tier Heroes and a Retirement Home for Brawl Lucas Mains
By: Marco Salazar De Leon
Tags: Super Smash Bros, Storytelling, Community, Esports, Competitive Gaming

“Y’see, Brawl Lucas had a much better recovery than Ness”

Every few years, I commit a cardinal sin. I load up Smash World Forums and review some of my old posts.

It feels a little too cliche to revisit old internet accounts. Like a high school burnout digging through their yearbook to time travel back to when things were better, and music had SOUL, it’s easy to mistake the pleasant feeling of nostalgia for proof of things getting worse over time. My latest bunk trip down memory lane didn’t quite do the thing it said it would do on the tin. Don’t get me wrong, I felt warm and fuzzy. But this last time I logged on, it really did feel like I was meeting some kind of new and unfamiliar relative.

Meeting your past self with surprise is a sign of growth, right? I’d imagine that having little or “no memory of this place” must mean that I no longer fully identify with the person that came before, and I must have changed, right? Whatever the reason for the disassociation with my past thinking and posting, I’m thankful I didn’t greet it with disgust. I think it’s healthier to show some level of kindness to our past, and being able to do so — without the longing to revisit it entirely — is probably the better thing to be aware of than searching for evidence of change.

But I digress.

I was online, y’see. Clickity-clackity on the old keyboard, splitting open crates of phpBB goodness, when lo and behold, I discovered my posts in the Super Smash Bros. Brawl Lucas Boards.

Cringe is Good

For those of you that don’t know me: “Hi, my smash tag is Oats, and I was a low-tier main in competitive Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Nintendo Wii.” When I was young and naive and cared way too much about my choice to get good with a shitty character like Lucas, I proudly exclaimed that I was the best Lucas in my region between the years of “it-doesn’t-matter” and “why-the-fuck-am-I-bringing-this-up.”

I joke about it, but part of me still feels an immense sense of pride in who I was and the notoriety I carried at that time. Though, in the years since, whenever I revisit those old forum posts where I analyze and tear apart Lucas frame data and other similar minutiae, I struggle to explain and justify why I studied a children’s video game and why I played the way I did.

The answer is obvious: because I wanted to. Really, there’s no other explanation needed, and any other justification would be an exercise in adding sauces and seasoning to what is already a fine cut of juicy meat. But it takes a while for the average carnivore palate to appreciate naked, marbled beef and all its nuanced, undressed glory.

When I was a young lad, slanging PK Fires and angling PK Thunder 2s, I would have answered the why with a pithy, “Lucas is fun! Auto-canceled nairs on shield to bait the grab and then punish with a jab combo gets me off!” Today, this response doesn’t taste quite right, though. While I can appreciate the reasoning, it is dishonest.

For a few years, on any given weekend, I traveled anywhere between 30 minutes to 16 hours to compete in a game using a character with severely limited competitive options compared to the other characters I had available to me. I could say I played Lucas for fun, but because I was hoping to win at something, there were numerous moments when losing was certainly NOT fun. And regardless of my skill level, many of those losses came from playing that character. Yet, I still did it.

There is one hell of an ego rush as a reward for beating good players with my hand — metaphorically — tied behind my back. I’m sure psychologists, or folks more familiar with the science behind why we do the things we do, can draw a line between being a low-tier main and being some sort of gambling addict. They’re both the type of person that keeps playing their respective games, holding out for a payday that validates the person’s decisions and their emotional investments. Oh, and throw in a sunk-cost fallacy or two, and you got a stew going!

So why struggle with explaining it? I already pointed out that the ultimate answer is apparent and that it is simply “because I wanted to.” To go beyond that would be to ruin the steak with psychological mumbo jumbo and a deconstruction of a young adult’s irrational decision-making. To return to the revelation that I no longer identify with the person whose posts I sought out, I struggle with explaining why I played Lucas because I don’t want to be the unfamiliar relative to my own past. More than my desire to compete in a video game, I have always wanted to connect to others and tell my story.

Stories are Rosetta stones for translating the lived experiences, whether real or imagined, of the Other into ideas that we can choose to integrate into our lives or disregard completely. We may not be talking animals, but most children will tell you that the common interpretation of The Tortoise and the Hare is that “slow and steady wins the race.” It’d be nice for my fable, The Low-Tier Hero, to be entertaining and to have a meaning as straightforward as Aesop’s, but it certainly is a struggle.

Does my story need to have meaning, though? Aren’t we just biological automatons, operating over inherited and adapted routines until that fated day when our functions simply stop? That may be true, but like that 19-year-old, endlessly searching for the highly improbable moment when they’ll win a tournament with a down-tilt jab-lock into PK Love finisher, I’m searching for meaning in my story because I want to. And who knows? Maybe one day, I’ll hit the jackpot.