Them's fighting words!!

Years ago I wrote a post in which I analyzed a feud between two personalities in the Super Smash Bros. Melee pod – Aziz “Hax$” Al-Yami and William “Leffen” Hjelte. Hax$, through some of the worst arguments imaginable in an unbelievably long YouTube video, managed to flip his status as Melee elder statesmen into being a complete pariah overnight. What followed was Hax$ deleting, then re-uploading, then clarifying on Twitter, then apologizing, then re-uploading again and again over the next year or so, each time promising that he was truly done and going to change his ways, only to renege later. He was subsequently banned from most major Melee competitions, which is still largely true to this day. 

My initial thoughts were that there was probably a way to discuss how young people grow up using the internet as a proxy war against their enemies by using any tactic necessary, including the complete eschewal of the private and public curtain, without all the, y’know, Hitler comparisons. Any point Hax$ may have had was completely derailed by some of the bizarre and, frankly, absurd allegations against Leffen, who had a bad history but has largely moved on from the most dire of behaviors that resulted in a 1-year ban he received nearly twelve years ago. Ultimately, my takeaway was that this new style of callout culture, of using politically-charged language and psychological terms out of pocket and with a heavy moral slant, was deeply flawed and going to lead to more people getting hurt over time. This was an opinion formed by the belief that, at the time, Hax$ was using the tactics he’d seen on social media with the intended goal of driving Leffen away from the community by purposefully starting a mass harassment campaign.

However, new information has come to light that I feel changes my opinion somewhat.

Hax$’s ban was mildly lifted in his home turf of NYC, only to be recently rescinded after some of the local organizers, collectively, agreed that he had violated the terms of his ban by continuing to speak about Leffen and the ban in private and occasionally publicly. In the fallout of that, a friend of Hax$’s put out a long post where they put some troubling context to this entire fiasco – Hax$ is not only a clinically-diagnosed sufferer of Bipolar disorder, a condition inherited from his father, but is currently in the midst of an extreme mental health crisis that has included suicidal ideation, hospitalization, and heavy drinking. Stripped of his ability to play Melee competitively, Hax$ has made it clear he doesn’t feel he has any reason to live, to feel joy or happiness, and that he may as well have already committed suicide. 

Suffice to say, this puts the entire past few years in a different perspective. The bombast and delusion which coated all of Hax$’s claims against Leffen never quite struck a logical tone, but obviously that entailed there being logic to dissect. Someone in the throes of an untreated psychotic disorder is simply not going to act rationally or logically. When Hax$ asserts that Leffen wore an article of clothing of similar make and color to ones that he himself wore, specifically in an attempt to mock or harm him, I don’t think there is any ‘intent’ to be gleaned from that glimpse into his mind other than lizard-brained survival. 

At the same time, going through a psychotic delusion doesn’t mean total lack of consciousness. In prepping the video, committing to whatever poisonous churn his brain pushed into his psyche, there was no doubt an almost meticulous level of planning going on. While the motives and reasoning would be pure delusion concocted from being in an altered mental state, acting on those delusions still required a conscious mind. Indeed, one can do harmful things and burn their world to the ground over and over again while simultaneously believing that it is the only way to proceed, drowned in plotting and unable to determine the kind of long-term consequences a rational person would be able to.

Indeed, I think it’s a function of pop psychology, which I criticized in my original post on Hax$, to flatten psychosis into something so black and white. In the rush to hold Hax$ accountable for his actions, it must necessarily follow that this was premeditated with complete malintent, and every irrational action since is a calculated plot to evade accountability and manipulate his way back into these communities. Maybe to harm people again! “He may have a mental disorder, sure, but bipolar people don’t harass others with false allegations!” As we crash back to Earth, I would like to gently point out that, yes, people with mood disorders frequently exhibit symptoms of those disorders in ugly, dispiriting, alienating ways. Sometimes that means not having the energy to get out of bed, clean yourself, or eat. Sometimes it could mean conjuring up a convenient narrative, unsubstantiated by anything in what you and I may call ‘reality’, about a person who you feel is a genuine threat to your life and then acting on that delusion. 

To pretend that Hax$ is a Machieviellian schemer who is constantly trying to reroute and undercut his newfound enemies solely as a means of destroying someone’s life is, ironically, the same exact flaw Hax$ had in his original posts. Flattening Leffen into someone divorced from the context of being a teenager deep into online conflict and, instead, a deeply evil psychopath was clearly deluded and wrong. Leffen is not perfect, has almost certainly faced consequences as a result of dumb actions as a kid, and will continue to be a polarizing figure in the future, but it’s probably important to remember the age range and circumstances which begat those behaviors. Similarly, Hax$ should not be given absolution for what is obvious harassment, but there is a massive elephant in the room that is clear now, which is that these actions were done in an altered mental state that he will never have total control over.

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It’s a nuanced conversation, impossible to be had in the public shitpits of social media where sharks swarm to gobble up any nuance possible. I do not begrudge the loose coalition of organizers who were probably trying to do their best in the face of an impossible task, although I am critical of their decisions along the way. Like many choose to do in these spaces, the initial decision to ban Hax$ from all Smash-related events was the “kick the can down the road method” of issuing a permanent ban but refraining from using that language so as to avoid looking punitive. It’s a terrible method to go about things, mostly because it appears to leave the door open when there plainly is no light to be seen. Worse still, some organizers offered stipulations for potential reinstatement, while others didn’t, meaning the message couldn’t have been more mixed. 

But I get it – there’s no real right way to go about this stuff. There’s no board or group to appeal to, no one to collect information, no real way to collaborate and collectively enforce bans across this very large country of ours. I also understand that there’s this odd meta-game where Hax$ is directly responsible for some harassment, but a huge amount of the toxicity and ill feelings about the situation are driven by outside agitators who, again, want to flatten the situation. I know this very well from having dealt with the Infiltration drama for years – the loudest voices both for and against are rarely the people directly involved, and especially so if those people have both fans and anti-fans, such as the case with Leffen. This outside noise drives the need to ‘do something’, which necessarily feeds into the simplistic and un-nuanced views of those detractors. You should resist this pressure, but I understand that it’s incredibly difficult to do, and mistakes will be made along the way, almost unavoidably so.

Unfortunately we have to sleep in the beds we made, and I think as of now, Hax$ has probably sullied any chance of a peaceful reinstatement. According to his friends, he has sent hundreds of messages to hundreds of people in the communities in the last couple of months, some of whom have blocked him but he circumvents it by asking friends and acquaintances. This is harassment, and if indeed a qualification for reinstatement was that harassment must cease, then he has clearly broken that. There are consequences for actions like that, even if it’s exacerbated by something out of your control, and it would be extremely valid for TO’s now to wipe their hands of it and say he’s banned for now. 

I also understand that, for Hax$, this essentially constitutes a social death. Having been involved with Smash since he was a teenager, the fact that he has an unhealthy and co-dependent relationship with the game and its communities is probably not shocking, but is nevertheless sad. In addition, the fact that he does have this serious mental condition, which he did not ask for and which will likely cause a lifetime of regrets, broken promises and failed relationships, is a horrible punishment to go hand-in-hand with a permanent ban. I can only hope that he has a family and friends who will do their best to see that he gets good help and slowly learns to manage his condition.

For some that may be too charitable, but I also think we’ve been so conditioned that there is a “right” way to be mentally ill that our completely normal and human responses to people in pain are more or less aesthetically skewed. If someone posts haunting, sometimes artful descriptions of themselves as they wither away from depression, that’s going to be shared and responded to with kindness and compassion. If someone mistakenly believes that a detractor intends to harm them by manipulating all their friends against them, up to and including using paid media to do so, to the point where they are cyberstalking, harassing, and eventually publicly calling out this innocent person, that will probably not be treated so kindly. But the reality is they both stem from the same seed: an irrational thought loop caused by processes in the brain going awry, likely caused by genetics or a psychosomatic trigger that they had no idea about. There’s different levels of harm to be evaluated and condemned, sure, but I would hope that the same basic compassion still applies, especially if you weren’t the subject of that harm.

I guess I’ll end this by saying that my only hope is that Hax$ is not continuously asked to “take accountability” as he gets his life back in order, as I struggle to understand what that could possibly mean given the context of his mental illness. Aside from an apology to Leffen and those TO’s who he’s harassed, the only thing he could do is to pick himself up and start taking his condition seriously. That’s a deeply personal process that I don’t believe any of us are privy to, and to which disentangling actions caused by his disorder and how much responsibility he can take for them will naturally have to happen. I understand that for many there are certain rituals which, regardless of the outcome, you must do in order to “prove” you’ve changed, but for once, I think we can cut the horseshit. What he need not do is grovel before the slovenly public, who most likely doesn’t give a damn whether or not he types an apology or gets treatment or, frankly, lives or dies. 

That said, this will likely be impossible, as it is outside agitators who compel him to give into his worst impulses, steering him away from true help and driving this conflict further and further into the abstract. But I hope it does happen! Mental health is serious stuff and it should be taken seriously – a proxy battlefield for a culture war over the dumbest shit imaginable is no place for this conversation to be had. It may be the case that there is no way of getting help that involves staying involved with Melee and its communities, and that’s going to have to do. Either way, there’s got to be a conscious effort, even as much of his autonomy is stripped away by this disorder, and I hope he can make it one day.