Toeing the line between camaraderie and fierce competition is near-impossible, especially in fighting games communities, but the Super Smash Sisters have mastered it, with bite.
Smash Sisters isnât a club as much as an ongoing event, a series of Super Smash Brothers Melee and Smash 4 crew battles across the country. The goal is to normalize women competing at Smash, a Sisyphean task considering the gender makeup of most tournaments. And yet, last weekend at Virginiaâs Super Smash Con, the Smash Sisters drew around two dozen participants, all of whom seemed thrilled about the push for a competitive womenâs-only brackets in which they could sharpen their wave-dashing.
Emily Sun and Lil Chen, both competitive Melee players, approach the game with rare admiration for how players creatively exploit its technical elements, from edge-guarding to double-jumps. That admiration for the game also extends into their admiration for the Smash community, where theyâve cultivated long-lasting friendships with Melee players around the world. Now, theyâre carving out a space for more women to forge their own personal bonds through Smash
Iâm embarrassed to admit that, later on in our interview last night, the Smash Sisters co-founders appeared frustrated with me. Likely, itâs because I was pressing them on gaming-while-female, a topic that co-founder Emily Sun isnât as interested in as Super Smash Brothers itself. I donât blame her. Read below for our conversation on Melee purism, the beauty of fighting games and how it feels to lose to girls.
Cecilia: Tell me whatâs so compelling about the Smash community.
Emily: Last year, I randomly went to Denmark. I had no plans and didnât know anyone. So, I posted in the Denmark Melee group, âHey does anyone want to play?â I immediately got responses. I got housing that night. A person who, now, is a really good friend of mine showed me around the city and cooked me dinner.
The Smash community is amazing. Awesome. 100%. This shared passion is the glue that holds us together. Weâre all connected, around the world, whether we know each other or have friends of friends.
Lil: When I think of Smash, I think of diversity. Because the game is the sole thing that connects us, you see people from different economic classes, social groups, people you wouldnât have any reason to interact with otherwise outside of the video game. Now that Iâve moved to San Francisco which is full of privileged tech people, Iâm constantly reminded how grateful I am to have Smash to ground me.
Cecilia: Why are you both Melee players? The Melee community is often regarded as less friendly than communities around new versions of Smash
Lil: Melee forces people to meet in person to compete adequately. If it was online, I wouldnât know all the people I do now. When I was 17, I flew to Indiana and Florida for a video game. Thatâs how I made these friends [I have now].
Cecilia: What about Smash 4?
Lil: I havenât really played it. I donât have any interest in it, either. Iâm not remotely as close to being the best I can be at Melee. As a competitive person, I see no reason to dabble in a new Smash game.
Emily: Iâve tried all versions of the game, from N64, Project M, Brawl and Smash 4, and really prefer Melee. I do dislike the elitism Melee players have. But Iâm not gonna lie: I like my game better. I think itâs a better game. But I wont go out of my way to publicly tell everyone their game sucks. That mindset is disrespectful and unproductive.
As it relates to Smash Sisters, we both have a heavy Melee focus. When I run an event, I wanna do Melee. Itâs like how I donât want to run a Street Fighter event. Itâs not the same game. We have women who run Smash 4 events.
Lil: I think a lot of the tension [between different Smash versionsâ communities] would be removed if people just stopped acting like weâre all one happy, cohesive community. Weâre not. Iâm hesitant to say that, but itâs true. For several years, I didnât even know the top players at Brawl. But I didnât disregard their community out of malice. Iâm just absorbed in mine.
People act like because itâs the same franchise, we all know each other. Weâre smaller communities. I feel constantly like thereâs this obligation to play other games simply because of a brand pitch. I donât have that much time.
Cecilia: How did you start Smash Sisters?
Emily: At Genesis 3 back in January of this year. That was the first Smash Sisters event. Lil and I connectedâshe had been writing about women in gaming, and in Smash specifically, competitive gaming, for a while. At Genesis, I was like, âHey, does anyone want to do a womenâs crew battle?â I wanted to make more female friends because I didnât have any. There was a lot of interest. Lil was able to create the hype and exposure it needed to get this going.
Lil: It turned out pretty exquisite considering all-female events of this nature tend to have a lot of blowback. We were really pleased to see a lot of new and veteran women joined. Usually, veteran women arenât as interested in these events because they donât need it as much [to make friends].
Cecilia: Howâd you each first encounter Smash?
Lil: I grew up with a younger brother who gamed. I was basically the backseat driver of gaming. But when Melee came along, I couldnât help but join in, which escalated to battling customers who came to eat at my familyâs restaurant. Eventually, I attended an anime convention with a tournament, where I met competitive people. They dragged me into my first tournament and just put my name down to play. It radically altered the trajectory of my life.
Cecilia: You beat your brother a lot?
Lil: Yeah, definitely. It was a point of contention. Heâd spend all his time unlocking characters and stages. I wouldnât even care (*laughs*). And Iâd come back into the room and beat him. He was so upset.
Cecilia: How about you, Emily?
Emily: In high school, I was on the debate team. I was your typical ambitious Chinese-American student. I went to debate camp and, one year, someone brought an N64 with Smash. And all we did was play Smash and do debate. I went home and played with my high school friends, got into Melee when I went to college and dragged my then-boyfriend to our first tournament after I saw a flyer. I wanted to meet more people. Thatâs when I got into the competitive scene.
Cecilia: Who did you main?
Emily: I think I played Ice Climbers and Marth. It was chill.
Cecilia: Ha. Ha.
Lil: For me, Smash was an escape from school life. I was bullied a lot, especially because the town I grew up in was not diverse. When I fell in with the Smash community, all the sudden, being an Asian woman was a cool thing to be, so I got a lot of attention around that. I was 15 or 16. I was like, âI guess itâs better than the crap Iâm getting at school!â
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Cecilia: Huh. When I play Smash at tournaments or larger events, I find that itâs often difficult to convince male players to hand me a controller. That happened last weekend at Otakon. Sometimes, they just shut me down or say inappropriate things. Has that happened to you?
Lil: At a tournament, a friend once said to my boyfriend, âI would never let her out of the house wearing that.â I was wearing short shorts. Obviously, I was going to stick out because, back then, there was a gender gap more severe than there is now.
Emily: Luckily, one of my first Smash groups was my dorm-mates: three other females. All we did was play 4-person free-for-all casual with items. Our gay best friend across the hall played Pikachu. That was my first Smash group. When I first went to tournaments and more competitive stuff, I did get a lot of comments like, âOh, youâre really good for a girl.â Some people would be like, âMake sure you donât lose to her. You canât lose to a girl.â
Cecilia: Do you find that, when you play with other women, itâs hard not being the âonly girlâ anymore? Is there a culture of cattiness?
Lil: I wouldnât use the word âcattyâ as much as âhave probably internalized a lot of societal behaviors that can be sexist.â Itâs the best way I can say it. Itâs something I face too and am slowly growing out of. When youâre in a competitive gaming community that is predominantly male, you absorb the behavior you see around you, whether right or wrong. Itâs your default environment. It took me a while to appreciate female camaraderie and itâs still something Iâm learning. Its something we consider when we run Smash Sisters. Everything about our image is devised not to pitch women against each other because thatâs what we dealt with growing up in the gaming scene.
Emily: I was never able to get âcattyâ with anyone because I rarely had female friends.
Lil: I was always compared to the next girl who joined a Smash game. It was this metaphorical mud-wrestling match. As a young girl, youâre just trying to better the other girl.
Cecilia: Considering that, do you identify as feminists?
Emily: Iâm not a feminist because I donât see myself as someone who actively tries to promote equality between men and women.
Lil: She says that and then she runs Smash Sisters!
Emily: Itâs more selfish. Maybe, at this point, Iâve become a feminist, but I wouldnât have said it before. I like that itâs about equality, but I donât like the negative connotations of the word and donât want to be associated with that.
Lil: Iâm, like, the opposite. Iâm known as the feminist of Smash and eSports.
Cecilia: I like that contrast. Its seems fruitful.
Emily: Thatâs why weâre great partners. If we disagree, its okay.
Cecilia: So, Smash is my favorite game. But Iâve hard a hard time explaining why to people. Whatâs so special about it to you?
Emily (*exasperated*): Thanks for asking about the game. I fucking love the game. What the game is is art. Its self-expression inside a well-defined medium. In Smash, youâre given these technical tools so you can express yourself. Its so beautiful. Its something you donât see in any other game. Its a free-form, free-flow movement that, when you incorporate things like directional influence or a double jump and the ledge and aerial space, creates thousands of permutations of options to express yourself and is beautiful and is art.
Cecilia: Holy shit.
Lil: When I was a kid, I remember picking up Mortal Combat and Soulcalibur, but thereâs a freedom in Smash that didnât exist in 2d fightersânot that theyâre not deep. Theyâre very deep. But in Smash, you can immediately tell thereâs a fluidity that doesnât exist in other games.
Cecilia: Whatâs the secret to getting more controllers in girlsâ hands?
Emily: Itâs the fucking holy grail. Haha.
Lil: This is my favorite question. Because I donât know. Iâm not hesitant to say that, because the issue of women in gaming is way too controversial. Itâs sensitive and polarizing. We donât know whats right. Weâre gonna try things. There might be multiple solutions and multiple mistakes. I donât wanna sit on a throne and say, âThis is it. Itâs gonna cure everything.â This is an experiment. Were seeing the result produced. Weâll change to reflect the results.
Emily: And⊠with that said, hereâs a roadmap. Just some ideas that might work:
Increasing our âinstall base,â our user base. Thatâs our aim with Smash Sisters: Getting casual gamers to play.
Create a community, so thereâs friendship, a reason or incentive to come back.
When you have a community, you have to create content for that community, like combo videos or tournament videos. Maybe friendly rivalries, even. Or having a partner to grow with.
Having the resources for you to get better. That means having the right mindset, deliberate practice, having someone better than you around.
And then, you have to go to tournaments. If you donât go, you cant get better.
Lil: The higher-level aim is normalizing the notion of women competing. All of Emilyâs proposals feed, basically, into retention.
Cecilia: Thanks so much for your time.
*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
