When I shared my post about the deceased Super Smash Bros. Melee player Aziz “Hax$” Al-Yami, I expected being told to kill myself.
Truthfully, this is mostly a function of Twitter (sometimes called ‘X’ by the worst people in the world). Being owned by a white supremacist, breeding-fetish jerkoff with millions of followers kind of sets the stage for the kinds of interactions you get. If you look at any shares on Reddit or Bluesky, the comments section is far quieter, and I’m sure that has very much to do with not being mired in the primordial soup of degeneracy.
But I’m no hack – despite a rather large amount of commenters who simply laundered their seething hatred towards sexual minorities (likely having to do with some kind of repressed psychosexual disorder) through their posts, that certainly wasn’t every commenter. This is a heated topic, one that a lot of people feel many different ways about, and not everyone can express that in the cleanest of ways. Healthy disagreement is always good
However, I couldn’t help but notice that some of the most ardent detractors had such a fervor in their posts when it came to what Al-Yami’s death “meant”, a zealotry that struck me as bizarre. We’re talking 0 follower goofs with 230 posts, all made within the last month, that post exclusively about Hax$. It’s possible that these are just alt accounts that some have made in order to safely bang on about this issue without coming across as obsessed or deranged on their main account. There’s another likelihood: this is the predictable consequence of trying to make someone into a martyr, a person whose death, specifically, can have a quasi-religious meaning towards a greater end.
There are ways in which this can be a benign feature of fandom. Many reached out to me privately, saying that they had an admiration for Al-Yami for multitudes of reasons not strictly related to his banning. Some were impressed that he worked his way through a severe injury in order to play again, others thought his dedication to Melee and explanatory videos doing deep dives into the system mechanics of the game were really cool. Others still seemed to have noticed and possibly related to some of the traits more related to his mental health struggles, which made them want to root for his success. This is a pretty natural thing, and an outpouring of emotion related to those could be totally understood.
Where I get lost is when there is a protracted effort to extract a “meaning” from Al-Yami’s death that can be constituted into some kind of grassroots, political action. Specifically, there seems to be a desire to “hold people accountable” for his death, as if it was murder rather than neglect and self-harm. In the rush to do that, Al-Yami, in life and death, is now woven into this grand tapestry, a struggle that is both overt and covert, where many members of the community are involved in a cause and they don’t even know it yet. What is the cause?
I’m…not really sure.
From the dozens of replies to my blog, it would be reasonable to take away these broad positions of this so-called “movement”:
- Al-Yami should never have been banned in the first place, and even if an initial ban was necessary it should have been for a short amount of time
- William “Leffen” Hjelte should have been permanently banned from tournaments for crimes done over ten years ago and/or acting the same way Al-Yami was
- Tournament organizers for Melee need to have their power taken away for “silencing a victim of abuse” in Al-Yami and making him a pariah
Al-Yami’s death has provided the perfect blunt instrument to wield as a sort of moral authority. With that authority, the intent is to make some kind of political ask and hope that the stick they’ve made is large enough to bash the brains in of this authoritarian tournament organizer structure to win the day.
If nothing else, the incoherence alone should be enough to make this political movement entirely toothless. But I still think there’s something to be taken from a closer examination, since it is a very notable focus of obsession for many posters out there. So much so, in fact, that people who knew Al-Yami and want to eulogize his more positive traits are afraid to do so for fear of getting this political brigading in their mentions. It’s an understandable fear, but one I don’t share, and I hope I can make it a little bit less scary by showing the completely vacuous “morals” that allegedly exist at the heart of this sham.
But one thing at a time. I’ll do my best to steelman these positions before I give my critique:
- Al-Yami should never have been banned in the first place, or at least only for a short amount of time
To briefly recap, Al-Yami was initially banned from most Smash events because his hours-long videos crusading against Hjelte in 2021 were seen as harassment of a high degree, including several instances of slander where it was alleged, with no proof, that Hjelte intentionally lied to ruin other people’s lives.
The movement would say that this, itself, was a miscarriage of justice. It’s now commonplace for many to say that the form – an overly dramatic video presentation where Hjelte is compared to Hitler and fictional mass murderers and frequently referred to as a sociopath with no feelings – was out of line, but the message was right. In that case, they refer to some significantly cleaned up videos where Al-Yami is less dramatic in his claims, with fewer comparisons to brutal dictators.
There is justification for a reprimand of some kind, they say, but a year and a half ban from locals was far too harsh. As a victim of abuse and harrassment himself, Al-Yami should not have been punished for speaking out what he believed to be true. To put it more simply, “harassment” is in the eye of the beholder and should not be punished so severely by community leaders, especially if it is believed to be true.
- William “Leffen” Hjelte should have been permanently banned from tournaments for actions done over ten years ago and/or acting the same way Al-Yami was
This point is meant to speak to the hypocrisy of the Melee organizers. Hjelte, sometime around 2011-2013, as a teenager, could be said to have engaged in harassment of a severe nature, including mocking a fellow player’s disability. The nature of it was so overwhelming that he was banned for a year from attending tournaments in his home country of Sweden. The argument would be that since that banning he has shown little remorse for what he did then, and has only continued to engage in harassing behavior since.
Particularly, Hjelte is said to have harassed the player Juan “Hungrybox” DeBiedma to a similar degree that Al-Yami did to Hjelte himself. By publicly stating his personal distaste for DeBiedma’s character and making a Youtube video where DeBiedma was portrayed as a devil in the thumbnail, Hjelte could arguably be engaging in targeted and serial harassment. Further, by sharing an alleged victim’s public exposé about Gonzalo “Zer0” Barrios and revealing a prior interaction that disturbed him in this new context, Hjelte was doing as malicious a smear as was accused of Al-Yami. The fact that he was never held to account by community leaders shows that there was a bias against Al-Yami for unknown reasons, which resulted in his banning while Hjelte’s discretions were ignored. If Hjelte couldn’t acknowledge why he was banned and continued to act in the same way, he should have been banned again permanently, since that is what Al-Yami received for allegedly doing the same thing.
- Tournament organizers for Melee need to have theirpower taken away for “silencing a victim of abuse” in Al-Yami and making him a pariah
Here we come to the grandest political ask, a dismantling meant to be done in the spirit of “never again”. Al-Yami’s life took a large downward spiral after his ban, to the point where he pleaded publicly and often that he needed to be able to compete in Melee tournaments again, begging for forgiveness from the organizers that had banned him. This reprieve would never come, and it is often believed that this is what led to his suicide attempt and eventual death.
The organizers could see he was suffering, but none were willing to grant mercy out of cruel lack of empathy, they’d say. They couldn’t see that Al-Yami’s life was completely fixated on Melee, and that clearly he would not be dead today if he could still compete and be “Hax$”. Some are willing to admit that yes, that is an unhealthy mindset – but it is from a place of passion, not sickness, that Al-Yami obsessed so hard over Melee. It would also be argued that tournament organizers have no business trying to evaluate the mental health, or police every action, of players – the fact that Al-Yami had to meet such a high standard is an indictment of unfair standard more than anything.
Worst of all, the fact that an un-ban would have required Al-Yami to no longer interact with or discuss his allegations against Hjelte publicly was a shocking abuse of power. With great power comes great responsibility, and these Melee organizers have abandoned that responsibility by needlessly overpolicing Al-Yami until he couldn’t take it any more. Organizers, when presented with the dire state of Al-Yami’s mental health, should have forgone their ban and let him back in with no unfair conditions held over his head, and the fact that they didn’t means they are responsible for his death.
I mentioned the word ‘incoherent’ earlier, and I think I may return to it a few more times. I have tried and tried, in good faith, to understand this nascent movement’s objectives and I’m left completely wanting.
On its face, the claims contradict one another. If you believe that Al-Yami’s videos, the accusations, the intensity, does not constitute harassment…how could anything that Hjelte has done since his ban possibly be harassment worthy of a ban? A joke thumbnail is now the same as saying someone is out to “kill the Smash community” and takes his queues from Adolf Hitler? Really? And don’t even get me started on the “He believed it to be true” defense. Al-Yami’s main argumentation against Hjelte was that Hjelte made up defamatory accusations against another person and had Al-Yami’s ex-girlfriend distribute it – what if Hjelte believed those accusations to be true? Would they no longer be defamatory? This all goes without saying that it’s very clear that many people in this movement just don’t believe you should be banned for any reason outside of violent action. So Hjelte would be in the clear again! Competely unserious.
Also, what is this argument that if someone threatens suicide, then that alone is cause to forego any prior disciplinary actions? If that was a serious statement in almost any other relationship context, these would be described as the actions of an abuser! Do these people have such little respect for Al-Yami, even in death, that they’d want to cast his actions in the worst possible light by highlighting that he would use emotional blackmail? I can’t think of a greater smear to someone’s reputation than that, yet they insist on making this argument.
Because they will never actually talk to these legions of Satan they believe Smash community representatives to be, they will never know the truth regarding the extent of the harassment Al-Yami was sending people. Using alt accounts and proxies, Al-Yami would get around blocks from these organizers in order to beg in their DM’s and hint vaguely at suicidal ideation. Even amidst negotations to get him unbanned, many organizers had to disengage because he would not respect boundaries. Apparently tournament organizers, even if they are local and have known the player for years, had no right to affirm their social boundaries, or ask people not to be abusive when they’re trying to help. They’re there to just shut up and take it, because they are barely human and don’t deserve anything else. Charming!
It’s also hard to ignore the sheer brute retributive aspect of all this, as well as the extremely skewed view of Hjelte coloring the politics. One of the things I tried to show in my original post was that perhaps, with some healthy distance and a more sober analysis, one might find that Al-Yami’s claims of stalking and harassment from Hjelte were colored by the same diseased thinking that made him say, for example, that Hjelte was scheming to wear the same colored pants as him to mock him. Somehow no one in his movement has considered, if only for a moment, that if you find yourself agreeing wholesale with personal analysis from a person who is admittedly suffering from alcholism and psychosis, the logic might be twisted. In fact it might be more accurate to call this anti-logic, something more akin to pure lizard-brained survival instincts boiling in a pot of nerve endings and depressants.
But, for the sake of argument, let’s just roll with that. Let’s say that everything should be tit-for-tat, an eye for an eye. Apparently the worst part about Hjelte is that he clearly hasn’t changed since was banned as a teenager, that he clearly still thinks he did nothing wrong and that recidivism is a-okay in his book. If that’s the thinking, then how was Al-Yami any different, morally speaking? Remember, he was unbanned from his major NYC local, for at least a year, and through no one’s fault but his own he continued to foster and spread these allegations against Hjelte. If a TO expressed a boundary that that is not cool and it wouldn’t be tolerated…why would that be worthy of disrespect? “‘Cause it’s bullshit”? Again, we’re back to the infinite regress of ‘slanderous allegations are wrong unless you believe them to be true’, which is a statement so stupid it’s not even worth interrogating, and taking manic, paranoid beliefs as the God’s honest truth with with no scrutiny. I truly don’t know what Hjelte did to some of these people to earn such a consistent, sustained harassment campaign, but it’s clearly not really about Al-Yami anymore, if it ever was.
At what point is all this just a contrived narrative to Trojan-Horse in longstanding unrelated grievances? None of the logic holds up, it’s playground-level analysis gassed up to sound like the Magna Carta. You have to believe that some of the folks involved in spreading this narrative are smart enough to see how silly it is. But obviously, the point isn’t to have a cohesive political message, it’s just to use that skin in order to harass people they already don’t like, with a moral cudgel that they feel was wrongly used against them before. It’s just pathetic and embarrassing, really. Someone got banned from playing in Smash tournaments because they got caught using an alt account to talk about how trans people are the devil, and now they want to take the moral high ground. Get real.
I think the most disgusting part is that because this is all just a game, no bad tactics and only bad people, it doesn’t matter that one side clearly lies with snakes, or that people who don’t know any better get caught up laying with them. The avowed racists, the antisemites, the transphobia, the gay-bashing that comes out frequently on any Hax$-related topic is just the weapon that randomly spawned on the map. Even if they disavow it, they’re okay with using those types as the foot soldiers in this arduous, stupid war, because the ends justify the means. Now Al-Yami’s reputation, which he was distraught over losing and clearly would have given anything to get back, has, in his death and without his consent, been welded to this unholy alliance between aggrieved gamers and the Fourth Reich.
And for what?
When I tried to focus the attention on the very real mental health struggles that Al-Yami had, it was coming from a place of empathy. I knew that the conversation about him on social media was incredibly dark, that a lot of people refused to weigh in because they didn’t know how to address it without their mentions turning to shit for a few hours. A new perspective, one divorced from the ugliness playing out, could, I feel, be a little wiggle room in an otherwise unbearable conversation, that could divorce the nasty-but-real aspects of Al-Yami’s last few years from the better memory that many had of him, and the impact he clearly had on a certain generation of Smash players. Better to remember the person they had genuine, kind, and funny interactions with than someone lost to his worst impulses due to a terrible and debilitating mental illness.
I got told a lot in my mentions that I “lacked empathy” for this perspective, that I clearly had a heart of stone because I couldn’t see how this person was tortured by people and that I ignored years of abuse which caused the mental collapse. To that, I say this – I have more empathy in my pinky toe than this entire movement does. I can close my eyes and imagine myself in a scenario where every lingering fear and doubt I’ve ever had is pulsing against my conscious mind, and although I recognize that it’s unhealthy and dangerous, I find myself completely unable to resist indulging them, which will set my life on fire. I’m also able to put myself into the shoes of someone who has a friend that is clearly suffering from something that is beyond his or my control, of having to make the incredibly difficult decision to cut them off as they keep harassing you over and over again and trample my boundaries. I can disagree with some of their tactics, the logic underpinning their judgement, while still understanding that there was no easy or right answer.
As always, the accusations are projection. Empathy isn’t solely channeling the anger and directing it in a blind rage at people you stubbornly and mistakenly believe caused someone’s death. It is not more empathetic to spend your time on social media harassing innocent people for expressing their true thoughts while you post pictures of someone half-dead in a hospital bed. There is no empathy in making a public viewing of the deceased, with their pale, suited corpse on display, into a spectacle and trying to make a viral moment for the clapping seals that give you headpats online. And there is certainly not an ounce of empathy in frequently telling someone struggling with manic phases and paranoid thinking that the people they think are out to get him are real, and he should continue to indulge his hostile brain that is slowly killing him.
Take your martyr narrative and blow it out your ass. Get your damn kiddie pool politics out of games and grow up.
Them's fighting words!! 
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