Brace yourselves, people, this is the one time I’ll ever use scatological terms.

So, as some of you may heard, Birmingham VGC has been marred by the disqualification of its champion, Ruben Puig Lecegui, who also won in 2011, for this incident. Now, what people who weren’t there or aren’t a part of Smogon don’t know is that this incident was completely blown out of all proportion by a certain PokeChamp21, who thought it would be funny to turn what was a fairly minor incident involving one piece of shit wrapped in tissue into a full-scale scat-war. Dude, if you’re reading this, did you even think about the possible consequences of this? Actually, let me answer that for you, yes, you did, you knew if you made it sound as over-the-top gross as possible then, excusing the pun, shit would go down. You were courting for controversy, and in the process have left a brown runny stain on the reputation of everyone who play Pokemon, because now the outside community are going to think we’re all animals. If this was all a plan to get Ruben disqualified, then well done, you got what you were after.

Reading through Smogon’s thread about the event, I saw a lot of abuse towards Ruben, some for his supposed “arrogance”, since he likes to make a huge deal out of everything and dances around when it looks like the battle’s won, and some outright racist remarks suggesting the Spanish players “go win their own VGC because this is ours!” Grow the fuck up, people. Arrogance and celebration are not the same thing, if he was truly arrogant he’d be trash-talking all his opponents before the match, and anyway, unlike most of the players there, he has the skills to back it up. Winning two VGCs in a row and getting 3rd at Worlds last year isn’t something you can just fluke, no matter how much hax you get, you have to be able to play well to actually win when it comes to the big matches. As for all the Combo-esque cries of “THIS IS OUR COMPETITION!”, nowhere on TCPi’s rules does it say that players from other countries aren’t allowed to compete. If they want to come here and compete in our nationals, they’re free to do so. If you have a problem with someone from another country winning, then you have a problem with people from other countries full stop. Either learn to tolerate it or up your game and beat him yourself, then you’ll have the right to say he shouldn’t have won.

Now, back to that article before, from Dig-shit-alspy (surprisingly Kotaku, which is effectively the Sun of gaming journalism, doesn’t have an article on this at time of writing). These guys are the ones who really let things get out of hand, by assuming Pokechamp’s warstory was true and letting the whole thing spread way further than it should’ve. I’m not saying don’t blame PW, go ahead, feel free to blame them because it was one of their members who wrote the source for the articles and they’re all racist bigots anyway, but it’s these dumb ‘news’ sites who brought the story to the public eye and gave the impression that our community is made up of chimpanzees. I never liked any of those sites, and I sure as hell don’t like them now because it makes admitting to liking Pokemon, and the fact I attended last year’s VGC, even more dangerous. Nobody I know in real life knows yet, and after this I’m not telling them any time in the near future.

So now we’ve looked at the issues of crap journalism and intolerant arseholes, let’s see how this could affect the future of VGC. First of all, I fear Ruben might end up being blacklisted by TCPi and possibly unable to compete in the future (he’s already banned from competing at any other venues this year), which would be a great shame because most of the community loved him, he brought some life to the proceedings and it’s nice to see people from across Europe coming to our shores, united by Nintendo’s finest franchise (Mario is way overrated and I’ve not played enough Zelda to judge it). Secondly, will the NEC be willing to host another VGC after the bad publicity it’s got from this incident? If reports of people throwing their own faeces are spreading across the internet, that’s not going to do you any favours, and I think they might well move it to somewhere else fearing a repeat incident, as highly improbably unlikely as that would be. But, in those circumstances, where else could they host it? There’s only really two other locations they could go for, London or Manchester, and both would restrict numbers because casual players won’t be willing to travel to the other side of the country to the event, so numbers will drop. Lastly, and this is a long shot, will TCPi look at this incident and decide to cut funding for Europe’s VGCs? Probably not, and I don’t see how limiting the number of events would solve anything, but when you’re paranoid these things are always a concern.

So, for those of you who couldn’t make it through the wall of text, Ruben got disqualified because someone exaggerated what was a relatively minor incident and that spread across the internet, there’s still a worrying amount of intolerant and possibly racist people in the community and the future of our VGCs hangs in the balance. Watch this space. Next year, if Europe gets skipped, or they bring in new rules stating only UK citizens can compete or any other daft new rules come in, you know why. Direct your fire towards Pokerob and his terrible website, they got us into this mess.