I love fall every year, but especially this one. The New England Patriots seem back to being a competent football team, the tree leaves around me look beautiful, and I’ve been spending a ton of time with family and friends, at least when I’m not studying for school. Last week, I got myself a pumpkin coffee cake for no good reason; it was on sale at the grocery store and I was in a celebratory mood.
What the hell am I rambling on about? I don’t know, dude. Since Riptide, I feel like I’ve brought up nothing of substance in this column. Four weeks ago, I wrote about attendance trends – pretty solid as far as Melee topics go. I then talked about viewership in the subsequent column before then doing a Patron mailbag and writing another nostalgia piece about The Big House. And most recently, I just recapped a bunch of smaller tournaments. Am I really going to do that again?
No, but I’m going to do something way more dumb and insufferable. When you have nothing to say about the current moment, sometimes it’s occasionally worth looking back at the past. In today’s column, I will review what I talked about in this column space around this time of the year in each of my previous Monday Morning Marths.
Picture this: there is no Big House to talk about. Wavelength already happened weeks ago. While Luminosity is about to hold a major, it’s too soon to cover it. I had also just written an entire column about Zain’s legacy. I remember it like it was yesterday – I suddenly realized now was the time to write a column detailing the Extinction Event: a term that any hardcore fan of Melee might recognize or immediately understand as soon as they see it.
What’s interesting about this column is that I decided to run with it at all in the first place. After all, it is a very stupid inside joke and not an actual tournament, which happened that upcoming weekend at The Function 4. Come to think of it, why didn’t I just preview that event? If I remember right, I think I was applying to my program around that time and felt pretty creatively uninterested with the way that I used to do tournament previews. As a result, this is what I gave you. Do I regret it? Eh, not really. I could have used my time better, but it wasn’t so bad. I also had been practicing my turndownforwalt impression around that time in preparation for the major I was about to attend in a month (Don’t Park on the Grass). In hindsight, maybe I ran with it so I could land with this ending.
Over time, the Melee community will slowly morph into the Walt community. All of us buy his merch. We will all get invested in Brawhalla. Some of us will play tag. He will commentate all of it. After enough time, we will dress up like Walt. We will talk like him. We will become Walt. We are now Walt. How’s it going, ladies and gentlemen? This is turndownforwalt.
On second thought, maybe I need to workshop the punchline.
I did not remember writing this column. That was because this was around the breaking point of “peak Melee burnout” for me. It was not the darkest period of my life, but it was more like the calm before the storm – right before I hit rock bottom. On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t be writing this. Oh well.
As far as the actual approach I took to this column, this was another variant of the “Edwin has jack shit to write about, so he sticks to a tried and true template” piece. There’s nothing that I feel especially strong about in how I previewed these events, but for me, it’s more like an interesting mirror into what I thought about the scene back then and trying to find the right balance between expressing myself and filtering enough of it to just talk about shit in the scene. I did find this part of my old Monday Morning Marth funny though:
I spoke to skrat, the TO of this tournament, recently about his plans for [Santa Paws]. According to him, he wants to make this a recurring event for the Atlantic South. If this year’s event is successful, the Alabama scene could suddenly find itself becoming a new central ground for the broader region. A Zain appearance, though I’d consider it unlikely, would probably elevate this tournament to the top, as well as provide him a final opportunity to take on Cody for the title of No. 1.
Through no fault of skrat, Santa Paws ended up not coming back, in large part due to severe mismanagement from its ownership. Meanwhile, not only was a Zain appearance “unlikely” – he and Cody ended up playing an exhibition first-to-ten for No. 1 on SSBMRank in extremely controversial fashion. He did get that final opportunity to take on Cody for the title; just not here.
Reading through this column again, I was reminded of a large reason for why it felt so cold: my attention was elsewhere (see above). Without peeling the curtain back too much, the process of making the last Melee Stats video was pretty unpleasant, chock full of delays, and unbelievably frustrating. I would go on a limb and say that it was the most miserable creative experience I have ever had. However, in hindsight, I wish I had celebrated it more for instead of constantly thinking the entire time that Panda Global had beat us to the punch. For what it’s worth, by the numbers, it is our best performing video of any that has been out for around its first two years.
2023 sucked, but 2022 was when we were wheeling and dealing (mostly). This was the ‘renaissance’ period for Melee: when sponsors were buying low and the community was raking in greater visibility. Summit was around, Smash World Tour seemed very confusing and exciting at the same time, and while we had trepidation about Panda Cup, at the very least, things with Nintendo seemed to be going well. Let’s review some highlights from my early preview column on both Smash World Tour and Panda Cup.
If the circuit ended right now, here’s what would happen.
- Hungrybox would be invited to represent North America
- Excel Zero would be invited to represent Central America
- Raikin would be invited to represent South America
- Professor Pro would be invited to represent Europe
- aMSa would be invited to represent Japan
- Joshman would be invited to represent Australia
- Sala would be invited to represent the “Wild Card” spot.
After that, the next 23 players would be invited to the SWT Championships based on points: Zain, Mango, iBDW, S2J, Jmook, Leffen, Pipsqueak, KoDoRiN, Lucky, Bbatts, Jflex, lloD, Skerzo, Wizzrobe, Medz, null, Mekk, moky, Chape, Amida, Frenzy, Ben, and Spark. You have a mix of supermajor contenders, Top 25 players, Top 50 players, international talent, and hidden bosses who will almost certainly make the Top 100 ballot. All of it, just to remind you, is for Melee’s largest prize pot ever.
I’m trying to wrap my brain around what the equivalent of this would be in 2025. It would be like if most of the Top 10 were present at a major with hybrid pools, but it also randomly had Pricent, JCAM, Inngenn, Goodie, and then, for some reason, Yetis Exist was there. A potpourri of talent ranging from “awesome underdogs” to “secretly Top 50” all from hidden regions. Man – it sucks that Smash World Tour got shut down. Speaking of which, let’s see what I had to say about the Panda Cup.
Now, because this circuit is run by Panda – the same organization that sponsors iBDW and Plup, as well as runs our annual Top 100 rankings – it’s obviously worth following. It also has the whole “first ever officially licensed Smash circuit by an esports team” tagline, which makes it notable. I’m sure in the eyes of people close to it, this is a very important year for Panda Cup to run successfully. If it goes well, they could reach out to more majors, convince them that it’s worth partnering with them, and add them to the circuit. Reading between the lines, I’m guessing this means paying them loads of money or promising a fair share of advertising (or Nintendo) revenue, though this is just my personal speculation. Point is, if this year goes “well enough,” Panda could bring back its circuit in 2023.
I’ll save you some time in case you forgot: it did not go “well enough.”
There was once a time when my inspirational source for what to write about came from Twitter, and yes, it was actually just Twitter back then. Around this time, the Crimson Blur wrote a tweet comparing commentators who worked at Nintendo events to scab workers breaking a union line. Obviously, this was a ridiculous, if not distasteful comparison for Blur to make.
…is what I would say if I was a SCAB! All jokes aside, I think I captured this dynamic pretty clearly. Time has shown that every bit of cynicism and caution represented here was correct (although the scab comment was definitely going a bit too far). Even at the time, I had my doubts about Nintendo’s increasing involvement in the scene. Although, I have to say, I would definitely change some of the words I used here:
…The Edwin Theory of Smash Vanguardism. I truly view being involved in Smash as akin to working in an informal “party,” one in which it’s understood by fellow members that we see greatness in “enough” of each other to contribute cool things together for a game we unabashedly cherish.
I was smoking supreme crack with the term Smash Vanguardism. What the hell was I talking about? I think around this time, I had read Fidel Castro’s auto-biography and was just seeing that everywhere in the world. The spirit of what I was trying to get at – the communal sense of loyalty, cooperation, and prioritizing looking out for each other instead of grabbing the bag – was on the money, but I definitely was high on my own supply. Shocker, I know.
Conclusion
It is not always easy to look back on the things I write. In fact, I often feel dread whenever it comes to reviewing anything that I put out for public consumption. Importantly, it goes beyond just having a bad take here or there. What makes it so hard is that I often find that the things I express are often just a reflection of processing other seemingly unrelated things in my life. Do blogs truly encourage low-value thought and reactive takes? Why do I do any of this?
I’ve had different answers to this question over the last five years, but I think where I’ve landed is that I simply like sharing what I have to say about something, and I like the routine nature of doing so every week. It probably is true that most of my blogs provide ‘minimal’ value to my audience and that I could instead convert this series to something monthly or more long-form like a video format. However, I think that would miss the point. I like the fact that my blogs exist as an artifact of how I processed the world around me, and how I tried to express my thoughts. For the time that I’ve done it, it’s made me feel happy more often than not, and before I become dust and bones, it will be nice to know that there will be a digital record of what I had to say about my favorite hobby.