How the Smash community bravely did the right thing and got punished for it.

In the year 2020, a wave of allegations hit the Super Smash Bros Community, especially centered around Smash 4 and Ultimate (although every game got dragged in the line of fire, especially Melee for some reason). Those included sexual harassement and grooming among many others. I will not go into details because it is frankly not my place to talk about specifics. I was not involved personally, and would find it disrespectful to even weigh in on this. However, I think that the effects of those situations are worth discussing.

The community did everything right. The didn't try to sweep it under the rug, they investigated, prepared statements, banned the offending players, put things in place to try and prevent this from happening ever again, and made everything public. It was a very difficult thing to do considering some of these people were influential, and yet, they did the right thing. Still, they got punished.

Now, you can't talk about the community without someone coming out of the woodworks and calling everyone in the community a predator, no matter if they were even close to being involved with the situation. You'll hear things like "Smelly try-hard predators" or "Nintendo was right to take down tournaments run by predators", insinuating that every single player matches the description. And let's not beat around the bush; this is absolutely weaponized by casual elitist players who already had an irrational disdain for competitive players in the first place. They jumped on the occasion to smear the community's name without hesitation, throwing wanton generalizations because it fits with their agenda. It comes from a place of bad faith. Yet, if you're an outsider looking in, it's deafening, and defending yourself only makes it worse. We were punished for taking action to protect innocents.

And don't be mistaken. What happened was wrong. But also, it is completely messed up to realize that if we had stepped on our morals and protected the alleged abusers, we might have ended up in a far better position and not have to deal with all of this. People talk about creating an environment that is safe, yet when a community tries to do just that and doesn't protect its alleged abusers, it gets lambasted for it. Personally, I think we should have applauded them for taking action, not the other way around. The "critics" throwing insults around are essentially disincentivizing honesty.

If you think Smash is the only community with bad apples, you would be wrong. Communities bring in all sorts of people, some great. Some not so great. The bigger the community, the higher the likelihood of a "not so great" individual getting in there. I can guarantee you that bad apples like this exist in every community. Heck, some of those in the greater Nintendo communities that accused us of being predators were outed as alleged predators themselves. Bad people exist. You may think it os possible to catch them all before they act, but that is entirely naive. All you can do is prevention and react properly when such terrible actions occur.

And so, I will say something many will deem controversial; anti-competitive detractors who throw such insults around are contributing to making the world a more dangerous place for potential abuse victims. By punishing honesty and harassing a community that is making major strides in making their communities safer, you are telling people that doing the right thing will end up poorly for them. Good deeds get punished.