I never watched professional wrestling growing up, but I’m familiar with kayfabe: the unwritten rule that you must always protect the illusion that a performance is real. When The Undertaker body slams Randy Orton at WrestleMania, there have to be emotional stakes for you to care about it happening, even when you and everyone else understand that it’s not real. Importantly, kayfabe isn’t unique to wrestling. Sports, music, politics (especially politics) all rely on their own kinds of kayfabe. Even personal relationships have it in the performances we give to meet expectations, smooth over tension, or navigate uncomfortable truths.
Imagine that you’re in the same room as someone who has bothered you for a very long time. Worse yet, this person happens to be one of your friends. Clearly, you can’t just tell them to shut up. Instead, you crack a joke at their expense to subtly make your point. To me, that’s a form of kayfabe: putting on a performance to communicate how you really feel, but packaging it in something palatable for everyone else. In the process, you could have convinced yourself that it’s not actually a big deal. But even if it was, you can’t fully acknowledge it. Because you know the second part of kayfabe: that if you break it, all hell breaks loose.
There’s a recurring sentiment I hear from Melee players every now and then: everything feels stale. Everyone’s too nice. Nobody talks trash anymore. Salty Suites are gone. Rivalries are dead. What happened to real beef, like Leffen vs. Chillin? Doesn’t anyone care about the game anymore? 2015 was better than 2025. I have to admit that every time I hear this, I roll my eyes. At best, it sounds like boomers chirping from the bench. At worst, it carries a quiet kind of willful ignorance: an unsaid implication that we need fewer of these damn pronouns and more tolerance toward gamer words.
But I don’t want to dismiss the broader desire for conflict entirely. Maybe there is a real longing beneath these feelings. This column is my attempt to unpack this idea, where it comes from, how kayfabe used to shape the Melee community, and whether it still belongs in the scene today.
The Godfather of Kayfabe
If there’s such a thing as a definitive history of Smash beef, I’d wager the first chapter starts with H2YL—most prominently, Chillin. To me, he’s the most recognizable catalyst for large-scale feuds. In fact, the first notable Smash diss track was “Good Clux,” which he, Mild, Azen, and Anden released some time in the early 2000s. Mind you, this before they ever played someone from Deadly Alliance or the West Coast.
There’s no getting around the fact that this came from literal teenagers arguing over forums. Obviously it’s juvenile, dated, and if it came out today, it would be incredibly cringe. But come on. No one is getting hurt about teens bragging about how much better they were at a video game than others. We also have a compelling combination of motivating factors here: regional pride, competitive hunger, and, honestly, hormones. It’s presented in such an over-the-top way that there aren’t any actual consequences. The stakes are low enough to where it feels like an inside joke, and yet high enough to feel like it matters to those “in” on the gag.
Fast forward about a decade. Chillin finds himself in the middle of what would become one of the most iconic feuds in competitive gaming history. I’m assuming you, the reader, don’t need a full rundown of him versus Leffen, but I’m going to explain why this whole thing “works” and what people don’t seem to understand about it.
First off, Leffen was—and remains—an incredible shit-talker. The entire gag about Team Liquid not being able to sign solid players was comedy gold. In some sense, there were real consequences in that Leffen was taking personal shots. But it was still Smash. Even for most top players in 2014, this was a glorified hobby. Besides, Leffen owned it. He wasn’t some random outsider; he was a top-level competitor with no sponsor, speaking with the confidence that he could back up everything he said, with the implication that he should be the one getting a sponsor, not Chillin.
Then you have Chillin: defending this team’s honor, his own relevance in the scene, and his entire legacy, which was now being actively challenged by new blood. Let’s be honest too: given his own history of starting shit, Chillin had it coming. The stage was perfect for Chillin to meet his match; some might say to teach Leffen a lesson and take back his color.
What made it great wasn’t only that they hated each other. It was that they knew how to perform that tension without letting it get too ugly. These two channeled whatever real tension existed into a performative outlet for everyone else’s entertainment. Did they have to secretly like each other? No, of course not. It just happened to be way more fun for everyone to have conflict in this specific way.
The back-and-forths on Twitter. The rumors about a diss track. Leffen’s legendary interview at Paragon Orlando, where he outright says that Chillin has “no shot,” and that losing wouldn’t even matter because Chillin has not won, and will never, win anything of note in his career. Then suddenly the diss track actually comes out, and everybody goes wild—right before Leffen would 5-0 him. You couldn’t make up “my b” even if you tried. Everything built up to something incredible, and what started as a rivalry turned into one of the most spectacular moments in Smash; maybe even the best one.
For one last great moment with Chillin, we go to 2022: a completely different world than the one of 2015. Back then, he and my dear friend The Cheat played a historic first-to-five. This is unironically one of my favorite exhibitions ever, because of the simultaneously rich and hysterical subtext: none greater than the fact that the primary reason for this match was someone who wasn’t even playing in it. In fact, Chillin’s role in this feud was totally unnecessary.
Here’s the context: there was once a crew battle at a Smash Summit where The Cheat, a decent Luigi player in Arizona, once came close to defeating HugS, a top Samus player. A bit before that, Chillin, a lifelong friend of HugS, had picked up Samus as a secondary, frequently teasing him about it and proclaiming himself as the best pink Samus. Additionally, a running gag had emerged that HugS was constantly dodging a potential rematch with The Cheat, who merely wanted his revenge for an inconsequential crew battle match. Enter Chillin, who agrees to play The Cheat in a pre-recorded exhibition for the GenAssist stream—of course with Samus.
The match is aired with commentary by Junebug, Chroma, Jackzilla, and The Cheat himself, who already know the outcome. As Chillin wins game after game, the set seemingly ends at 5-0. However, there’s a twist that the commentators reveal to the audience: this is not the end of the set, because if it had ended there, the stream schedule would have too much dead air. We then learn that both players had agreed to keep playing until The Cheat won, purely to fill runtime. The final score: a 6-1 Chillin victory in the first-to-five.
From the time Chillin was a teenager to the last “feud” he ever had, he had a knack for understanding the importance of storytelling without being fake; of authenticity and passion without being forced. His career is proof that kayfabe is an art that you can refine over time. Unfortunately, not everyone is a good artist.
Bad kayfabe in 2025
Let’s pretend there is a Fox player who hates losing to Marth. This should be easy for most of you. He tweets, “hate losing to people who play like they were dropped as a baby,” or something like that. If you are the Marth player in this situation, what are you supposed to do? Ignore it? Tweet back with a snarky response? Share it in your Smash discord? The guy is clearly mad. He’s expressing it in the equivalent of the Smash town square. It’s not deep.
I think a lot of people think the issue is specifically social media. I can understand the reasoning here, but Twitter is also the origin point for Chillin vs. Leffen. To be more precise, the issue is the specific evolution of social media, and how people understand it. There is a greater cultural awareness that the digital realm primarily exists for grubby advertisers to make a dime from superficial engagement, and not for you to hang out with your friends. Once you realize that you’re yelling inside a system designed to trap you in endless rage loops and sell you algorithm-generated nonsense, the magic evaporates.
Discord is a little better because it’s more intimate and grounded, but it’s also fractured. In the 2000s, everyone was on Smashboards. In the early 2010s, everyone was on Facebook. Nowadays though, Melee Discords are a network of semi-overlapping friend groups that each have their own subcultures, norms, and in-jokes. You might feel halfway familiar with the people around you, and yet that familiarity often comes with baggage. It’s too personal for entertainment, yet not enough for any kind of satisfying resolution. Conflict isn’t exciting or cool in a personal Discord – or at least, when it is, it’s difficult to translate that into something everyone can understand or healthily invest themselves in.
Out of the main social media platforms that smashers use, Reddit was pretty good. However, the SSBM subreddit basically has its own cliques and sub-culture at this point. At the risk of saying the most cursed sentence of all-time, would it be a good thing to return to Reddit? I’m not sure. Cody Schwab seems to think it is. It could be possible to coordinate a gradual return to the main “smashbros” subreddit. Simultaneously, I find it difficult to imagine that people within the community would want to go somewhere so fundamentally different from where it was ten years ago.
Where we go from here is a topic for another day. For now, we can recognize that the infrastructure for kayfabe in Smash has eroded. With no shared spotlight, no centralized location where we can all get together online to spread the good word of Melee and highlight everything we care about, what do we have? We have bobby big ballz yelling “YOU’RE THIRTY!” or, respectfully, the occasional Salt crashout. It may trend in a Discord server. It may get upvotes on Reddit. Some of it may actually be genuinely great. But let’s be real: in the vast majority of cases, there’s no catharsis; only a flicker of relevance before the inevitable return to nothingness. It’s tiring, empty, and we eventually end up right back at square one, yelling into the void. No one wants to be a part of that. Well, almost no one.
The dark side of kayfabe
I think that some people (not all) truly want to be cruel without anyone holding them accountable or making fun of them for being losers. They’ve convinced themselves that saying slurs, picking fights, and being “unfiltered” is the same thing as being real. But it’s not authentic to be a man-child when you’re 30 years old.
I’m not saying everything from back then was worthless or that your favorite top player must do penance for saying a slur and giggling when he was a teenager. No one is going to get you fired from your job or kicked out of school for enjoying your favorite 2009 combo video. The truth is that we, as a scene, were dumb as shit. A lot of us were teenagers or socially stunted teens or twenty-somethings with zero perspective and even less responsibility. How can you know where the line was when your idols can’t even drive a car?
When people start reminiscing about the “golden era,” I have to ask: golden for who? We recently finished a season with the most women ever ranked in the Top 100. Do we really want to go back to when the scene was wall-to-wall guys, and even the so-called good ones couldn’t be trusted alone with a minor? Was it cool, actually, when grown men tried to sleep with women on their eighteenth birthdays?
I’ve genuinely tried to give this whole “we need more beef” thing a fair shake. The nostalgia is real. You wish that instead of trying to cancel each other, two people with beef could settle it in Smash. I get it. But let’s not kid ourselves: this is a childish fantasy. To me, that sounds like a bunch of emotionally stunted guys dreaming of the good old days when they could say whatever they wanted, play video games, and jerk themselves off. Besides, we’ve already seen what happens when kayfabe collapses; when someone starts believing their own promo. When the line between character and person dissolves and nobody around them knows how to pull them back, it’s no longer a performance; it’s just sad.
For argument’s sake, let’s say that this actually “works” somehow; that creating a space for more beef boosts engagement, gets a few more Reddit threads, and magically takes Smash into a fourth renaissance period where a few more Top 50 players can make minimum wage and have fans willing to file taxes for them. Is that the price of growth – to turn Smash into a pathetic 24/7 slapfight for bored viewers and ad impressions? I’d rather play Melee in a basement with five good people than sell out a thousand-seat venue to watch two strangers call each other slurs for clout. If that’s what people want—if that’s what counts as passion—then you’re not building a scene. You’re building shit.
However, that doesn’t mean we have to abandon intensity altogether. Because contrary to what some people might think conflict still has a place; and it comes from the most sincere feeling of all.
The secret to good kayfabe
I want to point toward two recent examples of expressed hostility that captivated me. During Genesis X2, there was a brief controversy in which after SDJ upset moky, someone from the crowd started chanting “USA,” since moky was Canadian. Following that, moky confronted this player and told him to kill himself. Ideally, this should not have happened, and I don’t think it’s acceptable to say that to another person.
However, at the same time, I thought the entire situation was extremely funny. You have someone chanting “USA” toward a citizen of a country whose sovereignty is being actively threatened and disrespected by the current American president in part of an embarrassingly pointless trade war—all because he wants the underdog player to win a set against one of the best players at a video game in the world. If there’s a time for an extreme response to obnoxious heckling, it would be this time. Either way, as a result of his actions, and the player’s response, the community seemingly split into two different factions of discourse for this mini-controversy: Team USA and Team KYS. Eventually, moky and this player chopped it up in private and agreed to join Team Move On. Do I want it to happen again? No, of course not. Do I think it’s hilarious? Of course it is; let’s not get it twisted.
In fact, there’s an even better example that illustrates how hostility can remain compelling in 2025. Enter Junebug vs. Omar in R2 pools at the same tournament. I am not lying when I say that I have never seen a more ferocious live reaction to a set than Junebug’s reaction toward the crowd after game five. It’s more than anger: it’s pure wrath. It’s the type of feeling that if you’ve ever experienced, you’d immediately recognize it. To describe it as “mad” is an understatement; it’s a blood-curdling, blistering, all-consuming, full-body adrenaline boost. All that is to say that this moment fucking rules. Now, Junebug later apologized to everyone for turning into the Incredible Hulk, but the key thing here is the underlying emotion that fuels anger, passion, and really anything else. Want to know what it is? It’s care.
Norcal cheering for Junebug’s 4 sd’s aftermath😂😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/U5kzr96GGp
— Ahmed Saeed (@SparkinMed) February 15, 2025
When people say they miss beef, I think what they really want is a reminder that others care, and that they should care too. Think back to Chillin. What made his feuds work wasn’t only the trash talk—it was the shared language, the spectacle, and community-wide buy-in. Whether it was “Good Clux,” “Respect Your Elders,” or a FT5 that he won 6-1, there was always an implicit understanding that any conflict was part of something bigger that both sides were dedicated to. The kayfabe worked because the scene was small, the platforms were more manageable, and the stakes were simple. Over time, Chillin evolved his approach because eventually he gradually changed his relationship with the community and found new ways to showcase his love for it. Each of those things worked at the time in which he did them, and never in the same way.
The community has changed a lot over the years, We were esports until we weren’t. Then we were esports again, until we weren’t, again. The scene is both bigger than it was when most of us got into it, but it’s also not as big as it was during the glory days. The spotlight is scattered. We’re all in our own little worlds. With that in mind, the real question isn’t about bringing beef back; it’s about coming together and finding what can give us that same feeling.
Something new is possible, and it’s not like we don’t have rivalries. They just carry meaning in different ways that we appreciate the game for today. You don’t need a Smash documentary to tell you that Cody vs. Zain is great; to anyone watching today, it’s inspirational to see the best gameplay ever. Was moky vs. Aklo at Nounsvitational great solely because moky told the New York crowd to suck his fat cock afterward? No; it was amazing because of context; because moky cared so much about winning that set and earned it in a hostile environment that he implicitly consented to playing in.
Frankly, the game itself has always had a way of keeping people around. Last weekend, we had an event in which several top seeds dropped out of the event, and yet it felt as exciting and as fresh as ever. The new generation of rising talent – Krudo, Salt, and Ossify, among others – were all fantastic to watch. Full Bloom was a much needed boost to the community’s morale: a reminder that despite the horrific tragedy we as a scene are dealing with, people still love this game and each other enough to turn out.
Many of the reasons we love Melee in 2025 are different than they were in 2015 or 2005, and that’s okay. Perhaps instead of pining for heels, callouts, or diss tracks, we can be ourselves. We don’t have to let go of kayfabe; instead, we have to rethink what it looks like and slowly figure out the best ways to represent ourselves today. It doesn’t mean leaving behind the things that make Melee fun. It means embracing the challenge of learning to express care in new ways.
It’s okay to look back sometimes; to want the world to be what it used to be. I sometimes wish I were a teenager again too, and that things which once captivated me for a certain set of reasons could return and we could all enjoy it together. But we all have to grow up and move on with our lives— either to something new or to figure out how we can preserve the magic of something we’ve always known. Let’s move past outdated ideas of beef and keep building a space where competition, conflict, and camaraderie can thrive.
Incredible write up on how the scene has changed. Thank you for this as always!