DAY EIGHT: let me remember you
If Korea is where winners will find fans no matter what, then it is no surprise that Kongdoo Monster has never been particularly popular. Theirs was not a particularly accomplished history and, along with SBENU, they are one of two teams that have only managed to get a 1–17 record in LCK. Like SBENU, they were the gatekeepers of LCK: not good enough to avoid getting relegated at the end of every spring split, but too good for Challengers, which until this year they routinely stayed on top of. If we remember them as being better than SBENU, it might only be because in general, all teams played better than 2016, and because they in fact beat SBENU in the summer split of Challengers Korea 2016 to earn a chance back in LCK for 2017.
That’s when I picked them up, around this time in December in 2016.
Love finds you in funny ways. KDM found me with IEM Gyeonggi, my first live League of Legends esport tournament (All-Star barely counted). I needed someone to cheer for, and though I knew Samsung Galaxy from Worlds 2016 VODs, I took their finals finish as an affront to the ROX Tigers. And there was KDM, in soft grey blazers and green ties, facing off against SSG in the finals. They were, speaking honestly, bad. Roach played Poppy twice and Nautilus once (it was the tank meta, you remember) and was generally only good when SSG seemed like they were just trying to phone it in. He liked to make this pinched, self-effacing expression at the end of games, and seemed more owl than boy because of his large glasses. E., at that point one of my only esports friends, had picked SKT as her team and I, of course, had followed Smeb to KT, so we needed common ground.
I guess that’s all it took. From then on, I loved KDM unconditionally.
E. and I used to joke that we were two (2) of possibly two (2) total English-speaking KDM fans. (We are probably the only fans in the world who came to Kongdoo’s Overwatch teams by way of KDM instead of the other way around.) Nowadays, I know there are probably at least five of us, maybe 5.5 if you count Papasmithy, who would always find a cute way to keep them alive in LCK by namedropping them in regular games during the summer splits of 2017 and 2018 even when they were languishing in Challengers Korea. I know that there are maybe a dozen of us international Kongdoo fans, because I am a card-carrying Kongdoo fan, and they once cc’ed all of us international card-carrying Kongdoo fans in a single email.
I’m not saying that being a fan of a winning team is easy. Being an SKT fan this year was certainly not easy. But no one loves a team quite like the fan of a bad team, who knows their team is not very good and who picked them in part because they were never meant to be very good. In my time watching KDM, they only won five games in the LCK (one of them, amusingly, against KT), but when you are a fan of a bad team, every win is an exhilaration. Being a fan of a bad team is being a fan of the act of staying alive. There’s nothing that makes you feel mortality quite like rooting for your team to avoid relegation. All that effort, all that grind, just to stay afloat. Loving KDM was like being reminded of my mortality, that our existence on this earth is only temporary, that survival is an accomplishment.
Loving KDM was like loving myself. Each time they climbed back to LCK, it was an affirmation, that the climb, however insurmountable it may appear, can be overcome. That we do not fail alone. That there may not be infinite opportunities, but at least for now, there is still one more chance.
Loving KDM was also easy because Kongdoo made it easy. I was a card-carrying Kongdoo fan because Kongdoo had its own fanclub, EYES (which stood hilariously for ESPORTS X YOU X ESPORTS). I’m not saying that every esports team needs a fanclub, but Kongdoo knew how to run one. With my membership (I was a red cardholder, the second-highest tier), I was given a tote bag, a t-shirt, pins, wrist cushions, and a little compact mirror. One Christmas, they sent their EYES members a boxset of skincare, cookies, and a commemorative holiday mug. For their Korean fans, they had Polaroid giveaways and a fanmeet complete with musical performances. (Yes, my Monsters performed.) They sold branded phone cases (a different design for each of their esport teams), water bottles, lightsticks, and clothes. All typical of Chinese LoL teams, but even SKT and KT barely sold more than their uniforms online.
If Kongdoo Panthera died in bits and chunks, the end of Kongdoo Monster and Kongdoo in general came in one fell swoop in 2018. Kongdoo let go of all the KDM players, took over the management of Griffin, shuttered the EYES program, and announced that they would be changing their name to Still8. If you go to the Still8 website, you can see that the company hasn’t changed their approach to esports. It’s a blend of talent management and optimistic statements about making a better future for the gamers, which explains how they came up with EYES. However Kongdoo runs Griffin, I’m sure it’ll be for the better, and they’ll keep coming up with innovative ways to sell Esport, the Brand.
But my Kongdoo Monsters will never return. The players have split off into different teams (Roach, if you were wondering, went to Gen.G, where he will most likely be Cuvee’s understudy and never play a game), and most likely will never play together again. I know those years they were together, at first as ex-Najin e-mFire and then as KDM, were probably not very fun, full of the kind of suffering and depression only losing can offer.
But KDM, I loved you. You brought me a happiness only a bad team can. And that is a love I will never forget.
Thank you for your dedication to esports.
(This post is part of 12 Days of Esports for 2018.)
