yuletide | 2022 Yuletide Promo Post

Welcome to the Fandom Promo post, everyone!

Here's where you get those eyes on your fandoms for sign-ups!

Share what makes your Yuletide fandoms the shiniest and why you love them. A big part of Yuletide is how small our fandoms can be, and this is a good way to make sure other people know what gems there are out there!

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Title: Professional Valorant (Video Game) RPF

Media: RPF

Approx length: The video interview I linked below is approx. 3 hours long.

Where to find it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8Dj12swWYE

What is it, in summary?/What do you love about it?: I don't care so much about the whole of Valorant esports but I care about one thirty-two-year-old guy, called steel. What he has that none of his competitors does is not some divine gift for aiming or even personal strength of character--in short, what steel has is pathos. This will be the focus of the interview I linked. The crux of the matter is that steel started his career in CS:GO where he experienced a lot of financial hardship--even ending up stranded in the UK because his team refused to pay him. Do you see where this is going? I see where this is going. At one point in steel's career, he and his teammates were convinced to throw a game in exchange for CG:GO skins (which can be sold for money).

If you believe steel he only did it once and never again, in a game that didn't even matter, in an environment where other people did it more often. Nevertheless, this became the biggest matchfixing scandal of esports. steel and most of his teammates were banned from competing indefinitely. The very journalist who broke open this scandal interviews him here, years after the fact.

It's hard even years after for steel to talk about it. The thing that steel talks around the most is not the moment of matchfixing itself, but the aftermaths. That is the rawest part. I remember him saying that there were intermittently moments where he was so angry he blacked out and then his fist was already through the wall. Richard Lewis, the journalist, even asked if steel ever thought about ending his life. Never, he said.

Despite that steel kept grinding lower tier CS:GO tournaments where he was not banned. He streamed. He made tutorials. He was an In-game leader, somebody who shot-calls for his teammates, so he brought Tier 2 teams up right to the very edge of Tier 1 when he had to leave because his team needed to compete in events where he was banned. Finally he moved to Valorant, hoping for a fresh start.

Do you see the pathos now?

What struck me most about this interview, however, is that in the middle of steel's esports career, he had a year long stint working IT in the UK. This esports guy who had been in esports before esports was even a thing--this guy spent a year in the middle of his esports career working a day job. And then steel said that that period was one of the happiest of his life.

Why not? With the IT job steel had a stable income, which he’d never had before. He had a routine, which saved him from anything self-destructive he might have done at his very lowest. He had coworkers whom he got along with. And then he came back to esports anyway.

I think steel's pathos comes from this: the fact that steel’s love for esports is the single biggest tragedy of his life. steel might have been happy. He might have stayed on at that IT job and then been promoted and become some regional manager, or something like that. Once in a while he might look back at his early life with a certain fondness, with a vague bittersweet feeling, like a distant dream. But steel came back to esports to more suffering, to more failure, to more people questioning if he should be where he got himself. He came back to accusations of cheating and toxicity. He now plays ranked Valorant which is his own personal hell. All because he can’t leave esports. He loves esports, hates it, cares too much about it to treat it as just a job, and if I actually read Moby Dick I might even call it his white whale.

steel likes to quote Buddha's "life is suffering" and mean it. Case in point.

What sort of things are you likely to request for it?: In my deranged mind I actually ship steel with Sykkuno, someone he had never interacted with before. By all accounts steel should absolutely detest Sykkuno, because what steel hates more than anything else is people in high ranked Valorant games who throw by either not communicating, not knowing what to do, dying needlessly while hunting for kills, baiting others to entry first so they get the kill instead, generally being incompetent even though they are at the highest rank in the game. Sykkuno is guilty of most of this, except that he is at the lowest or near lowest rank in the game. If steel has to play with Sykkuno he will actually explode and take out the Western United States.

But Sykkuno has a unique gift in that he makes unlikely friends with people who seemingly would otherwise hate him. He's kind to people who show him open hostility. He challenges them in unexpected ways. He's not young--he's 31--and even then he's wise beyond his years. This is a guy who once said to his friend: Why make fun of the way someone laughs? Then they'll just never want to be happy around you.

Sykkuno is cursed--at all times--with understanding how people think and how people feel. He always sides with the person shunned by others, the one on the outs, because he understands how incredibly shitty social ostracism can be. And I have a feeling that Sykkuno would have a lot of sympathy for steel.

I understand how deranged this is tho so I'd settle for a character piece about steel lol. He doesn't even have an AO3 tag yet, because even I haven't written anything for him, because who would read it other than myself? Who else has a Thing for thirty-something men with pathos? Maybe a piece about steel's year in IT? Maybe something that chronicles steel's intermittent black-out anger issues? Maybe a fic that just has steel winning next year's Champion trophy by beating those snake BASTARDS who muscled him out of his first Valorant team, 100 Thieves?

Are there sections of canon (rather than the whole canon) that can be consumed by themselves to fulfil your requests, or that showcase particular characters and relationships?: You can watch 100 Thieves' (steel's old team) run to win the first Valorant tournament, or catch steel malding at https://www.twitch.tv/steel_tv

Look, I couldn't write any of this for you, but this is such an amazing promo post. I only know Sykkuno a little bit and I've never heard of steel but wow, this was a good read.

lmao. Thank you for reading my manifesto.

This is such an amazing promo post I feel like I could write for you from this promo post (I would not actually do this, have no fear).

Dammit. I am always so close to lure people into this "fandom," and yet so far.

Thank you tho lol <3

2022 Yuletide Promo Post

Professional Valorant (Video Game) RPF

Re: Professional Valorant (Video Game) RPF

Re: Professional Valorant (Video Game) RPF

Re: Professional Valorant (Video Game) RPF

Re: Professional Valorant (Video Game) RPF