When it's Too Late to Hit the Brakes
By Tyler Vigue
If you’ve ever driven on the ice and lost control, you know exactly what I’m talking about. One moment you’re driving down the road the next you’re sliding sideways with no more control over your car than a ball that’s been thrown. Once control is lost, it cannot be regained. The moment your wheels lose their traction, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get it again, no undoing the turn that you took too sharply, and no slowing down. Once those sparks blow a little further from the fire than you intended, by the time you realize that the ball isn’t going to hit what you wanted, after words you never meant to say come bursting out of your mouth, it’s all far too late because control is lost and the damage is done. So tell me this, dear reader, with your hand too close to those moving parts, with your confidence of where that tree will fall as you saw away at it’s trunk, and with your foolhardy bliss as you whiz down subzero roads, what else might you be losing control of?
Control is on my mind, not because I’m a control freak, but because a horrendous lack of control has led to some heartbreaking news in the recent days. I’m going to assume that you, the reader, don’t know anything about gaming, and you don’t need to in order to understand my point, but let me fill you in on the important stuff.
Gamers have communities. The people who play Pokemon, the highest grossing media franchise ever, talk about Pokemon online, they make YouTube videos about Pokemon, share Pokemon tips with their friends, battle and trade their digital Pokemon creatures from game to game, they remix and do covers of music from Pokemon, they draw Pokemon, go to conventions about Pokemon to meet other Pokemon fans, and they enjoy Pokemon more because they do it in a community together. Many fans do this with many different games or hobbies.
I personally am a huge fan of a game series called Super Smash Bros. which is a fighting game featuring various characters from other Nintendo titles (and beyond). The newest iteration of Smash Bros. on the Nintendo Switch has been called “a celebration of gaming,” as it features so many of gaming’s most famous faces and offers you something to love about each of them. As you could imagine, there’s a lot of people who enjoy this game, and so there’s a large community of active fans who do things together, online and otherwise. Because Smash Bros. is fundamentally a competitive game, fans hold tournaments, sometimes huge ones with huge cash prizes, where they play the game against each other, and fans of the game are often fans of these tournaments.
Some of the best players become mini internet celebrities, and I’m even an avid fan of some of these people. But this week, things got bad. A significant number of these gaming celebrities, from Super Smash Bros. players and beyond, have been outed by a huge list of sexual allegations, one after another. But the Smash Bros. players stand out to me with a lesson to learn, and that’s why I’m writing this article. It’s not about gaming, and you don’t need to know about gaming to understand this. My point is about control.
You see there’s something I spotted in the Super Smash Bros. community that I’ve noticed for years: They’ve had far too strong of an affiliation with anime. Anime is a Japanese style of cartoon animation that is very popular with geeks and weirdos (myself included) over here in the states. Anime has three main draws for people.
Japanese media studios know how to tell a good story. Many stories are epic, or sad, or hilarious, or all three (looking at you, Mob Psycho 100), and far richer than many stories we have in the states.
Japanese animation studios have got animation figured out in a way America is decades behind in. While Disney dropped 2D artwork years ago to switch to 3D computer generated movies, Japan has been pushing the limits of what 2D animation can do for years, and it’s amazing.
Anime as a general art style depicts super jacked dudes and incredibly… ummm, “blessed” ladies.
I said to a friend the other day (while playing a Japanese card game and talking about the anime that the card game originated from) that “I’m here for the plot,” which I would gladly get on a t-shirt. I love a good story, and that’s what draws me to anime and related media. But you have to be really careful with anime. The limits of what’s traditionally culturally acceptable in terms of exposure and suggestion in Japan (and this may surprise you as a consumer of American media) is actually far more risque than in American media. To put it right out there, many fans of anime, especially the men, are fans of it because they are unapologetically horny, and anime culture takes advantage of that. In fact anime has always been far too closely associated with animated porn.
So with all this explained, and with a second disclaimer that what I personally like least about anime is anime trait #3, this new light shining on serious sexual misbehavior in the gaming community comes to me with a great deal less shock than it would otherwise. The reality is that many of these people have been dancing with the devil for years, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that he’s been tripping them too.
For instance, let's take my favorite Smash Bros. player, ZeRo (ZeRo is a nickname, many gamers have them when interacting with the community and call them “tags”). ZeRo is from Chile, he grew up in poverty there, but eventually came to America and found a way to make a living by being amazing (and I mean amazing) at Smash Bros. He was incredibly entertaining to watch and with the release of the 4th Super Smash Bros. game, he became a world record holder for most consecutive esports tournaments won with over 56 consecutive tournaments won. ZeRo is a legend. ZeRo has since faded from glory but has made his living making (mostly) Smash Bros. themed YouTube videos.
ZeRo has also, as I’m sure you guessed, had a history with anime. ZeRo has often featured rather scandalous images in the thumbnails for his YouTube videos, and often uses humor around and about the more lewd side of anime and anime culture.
And, if you didn’t see this coming by now, this week multiple women, some of whom are underage or were underage when interacting with him, accused him of some pretty terrible things, which he has now confessed to being guilty of. These things included (with some dispute) inappropriate messages and even some accusations of open consumption of porn in actively occupied areas (like a living room).
ZeRo also issued a statement explaining part of his untold story, including sexual trauma as a small child. In case you’re unaware of this trend, many people who experience any form of sexual trauma at a young age often develop serious issues, sexual and otherwise, later on in life. That said, ZeRo took the turn too sharp down a road he shouldn’t have been on in the first place. It’s a shame because I’ve always loved ZeRo since the first time I saw him playing Smash in a tournament I was watching online. I think it’s that love for watching ZeRo play that really has forced me to learn from this, so at least his mistakes aren’t wasted.
But it doesn’t end there. ZeRo had an archnemesis/frenemy who goes by the tag “Nairo.” Nairo was friends with ZeRo but also rivals. During ZeRo’s 56 tournament win streak, the peak of his career, Nairo would play his absolute best and make it to grand finals in tourney after tourney only to lose to ZeRo. That was of course until tournament 57, where Nairo finally was the one to topple ZeRo, ending his win streak and taking the tournament for himself and getting a hug from his fallen rival in one of the most epic and emotional moments in Smash Bros. history.
Now that video is hard to watch, because Nairo this week was accused (and then confessed to) having an inappropriate relationship with a 14-year-old Smash Bros. player in that very same timeframe.
But guess what, it’s not just a culture that plays into sexual desire that can cause these issues. Like in the case of two others in the Smash Bros. community. D1, who’s normally a very wholesome guy and one of the best people to ever grace the community with his presences, or so it seemed, was just outed for an incident where he got absolutely destroyed with alcohol, blacked out, and woke up the next morning not even remembering engaging in non-consensual sex the night before.
Or how about Keitaro, another crowd favorite, who got drunk with a 16-year-old girl at a party and then proceeded, tragically, to do nothing as her drunken stupor took her over him. “I never thought I’d let it go that far,” I recall reading in his apology statement a few days ago which I now cannot access since he locked up his own account.
Isn’t that the case with all of these incidents? “I never thought I’d let it go that far.
“Oh yeah, I drink, but I would never drink so much that I blacked out and then slept with someone.”
“Oh yeah, I look at animated porn but I would never show it to underage girls in an open area.”
“Oh yeah, I drink with 16-year-olds….” I won’t finish that one.
Now as easy as it would be to meta-judge their poor judgement, I think our time is much better spent learning from their poor judgement, and at the heart of it is that phrase, “Yeah but I would never.”
This whole thing is so convicting for me, both in a general sense and in a more specific one too as I can relate with the struggles of these people, although I like to think that I struggle a little more aggressively against those evils than they do. But still, how many bad decisions to protect behind “Yeah but I would never” phrases? How many times a week, no, how many times a day do I justify a sinful choice because of the “worse” sinful choice that it’s not? Worse yet, what kind of awful futures am I potentially allowing for myself by not dealing with the lesser evils now? What’s going to happen when it’s too late to hit the brakes?
“This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness in of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.
But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus; that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness.
Therefore, putting away lying, ‘Let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor,’ for we are not members of one another. ‘Be angry, and do not sin’: do not let the sun go down on your wrath, nor give place to the devil.” Ephesians 4:17-27 NKJV
This is the passage that has come to my mind as I’ve wrestled through this issue. That last verse, which says “[Do not] give place to the devil,” that verse is often quoted as “Do not give the devil a foothold.” The original Greek word is “topos” which simply refers to a place, but I think the more specific leap to “foothold” is probably a good one. There shouldn’t be wiggle room for the powers of evil to be moving around in your life. Yet so often what we find, instead of putting away our old selves each day, the old version of us that had not been sought and scrubbed by Christ, we allow parts of it to linger. Not only that, we do far worse than give the devil a foothold, we give him a spot at the poker table and constantly deal him new hands. Is that a bad idea? Yeah but I would never let him get the royal flush on me.
Know this, Christian, and know it so well that you recognize it in your own life even before the tempter does: Every time you open up that bottle, every time to go to that website, every time you text that “friend” your spouse doesn’t know about, every time you give that little white lie because it’s easier than the truth, every time you put someone down just a bit to push yourself up, every time you choose to ignore the voices that cry out in the night, and every time you shut yourself away instead of revealing your true flaws, you deal the devil another card. You better hope it’s not the ace he needs to flush you away.
My best advice I can give to you, as difficult as it is, is to burn the deck. Take a long look in the mirror, but not the one you see in the morning, the one you see at night. You can lie in your bed but you can’t lie in your head. In those moments where there’s nothing else but you and your thoughts and you confront those demons you’re so keen to ignore, that’s when it’s time to move. Look at your life, weigh every decision. Does this have the potential to kill me? Make that decision wisely. But beware the most dangerous phrase you can play.
Except me.
I would never let things get too far.
After all it’s simply anime loneliness teenagers whiskey friends porn too late.