DAY NINE: the bullshit we’ve talked
Do you have that one work of fiction or art or whatever that you go back to over and over again? I do, of course. Every other summer, I relisten to the audiobook of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, read by Jeremy Irons. Every few years, I’ll rewatch or reread the entirety of Rumiko Takahashi’s Maison Ikkoku. Whenever I’m a rut, I go back to Jens Lekman’s Night Falls Over Kortedala, especially the second track, “Sipping on the Sweet Nectar.”
And every few months, I find myself rewatching “Breaking Point.”
With Brideshead, it’s mostly the pattern of Waugh’s writing I come back to, his overly lush but marvelously specific images, like his description of love as a low door in the wall that opens into a garden not overlooked by the city. With Maison Ikkoku, though, I come back to each time because I find something new. Maison Ikkoku, nominally, is about a young college student named Godai Yuusuke who lives in a boarding home, a communal living space that was very common in Japan in the 80s. He falls in love with his landlady, a newly widowed Otonashi Kyoko. Their romance lasts for seven years, through multiple love triangles and squares, graduation (for Godai), multiple temp jobs, unemployment, and a proposal or two before (spoiler!) Godai and Kyoko finally get married.
The first time I read the series, I was in high school, sick as a dog, and randomly checked out a few volumes from our local public library. To the 15-year-old me, even the 20-year-old Godai seemed so adult, drinking beer with his friends and trying to make money on the side to buy Kyoko a Christmas present. In college, I empathized entirely with Godai. At 20, we were hardly adults, and responsibility seemed so difficult, so fraught with anxieties. I was impatient with Kyoko, who seemed to dither pointlessly towards the end, clearly wanting to attach herself to Godai but never quite following through. When I read the series again in law school, though, I was Kyoko’s age, and moved by her attraction to Mitaka Shun, her other suitor, a rich tennis coach with beautiful teeth, a fast car, and the ability to cook. My husband, then boyfriend, was more the Godai type, and though I had no Mitaka, I understood finally why the decision was hard. Love is not security. They both require sacrifice.
You can watch “Breaking Point” from a lot of points of view. The first time, I watched it for the sheer drama of it all. Tell-all documentaries of an organization that is failing are rarely made from the organization itself, complete with access and cooperation, and are even more rarely released for the public consumption. It’s a postmortem of a terrible season done in the form of radical transparency, a way of building trust by showing the team at its most vulnerable. It may be that we’ll never have another “Breaking Point.” And for the new fan who may not have time to sit through all of a season of TSM: Legends or Squad or The Heist, at just under 2 hours it’s both digestible, trashy, and illuminating. I can’t think of a better primer.
The second time I watched it, it was to put Locodoco in context. By then I’d seen most of TSM: Legends and though I’d never been all that impressed by him, it wasn’t anything like what I felt after I watched “Breaking Point” the second time. Every conversation with Loco in “Breaking Point” is an exercise in needing couples counseling, a training case in marriage therapy. He deflects blame, only admits faults in order to make the other person feel guilty, can’t make any kind of concession, and just doesn’t seem to listen. And maybe that’s what all coaches are like, but there’s an object lesson in interpersonal relationships here.
It’s not that I think Loco is a bad person, and it may be that he has a very good analytical brain for the game, which in another world would make him a good coach for someone. But he was clearly the wrong coach for that iteration of Team Liquid. It’s tragic to watch “Breaking Point” and see all the ways coaching was hard for him. The moment where he whacks a keyboard against a table in frustration and then slams his body against the wall, for instance. Or when he passive-aggressively flicks a lighter while Steve is trying to get him to work on his nonverbal communication. Or every conversation he has with Matt, who seems to be pleading with him the best way he can, you are the coach, please do something, only to be stonewalled with more guilt.
Then, there was Piglet.
I once joked that Piglet was League of Legends esports’ first reality TV star, and I still believe that. “Breaking Point” in many ways is the coda to Team Liquid: Rebirth, which I didn’t appreciate until I finished watching all of Rebirth. In “Breaking Point,” Piglet is almost a plot point, an existence to push Dardoch over the edge. But if you watch Rebirth, you realize this was part of the problem. Piglet was a cypher, to Steve and Jokasteve and all of TL when he arrived. He didn’t speak English; they didn’t understand why he and Fenix would be kept apart by Korean notions of politeness and respect. He had just left an environment that was getting steadily more poisonous to him, and was by nature a loaded gun that his team would aim at its opponents. TL wanted a leader, someone who would understand the game and teach it to his teammates.
So what was there for them to do except carry on like lovers at the end of a relationship? They wanted each other to be happy. Piglet wanted TL to win, so that he could prove he didn’t need SKT. TL wanted Piglet to do well, to prove that their investment wasn’t a mistake. They tried everything, together and apart. It was a dysfunctional relationship, and you could see the end coming. Piglet out on the beach with TLA feels like giving up. But for the moment, it felt better to live in the lies. That wasn’t something I would have understood if I were younger. But now as an adult, I do. It wasn’t working, it would never work. But rather the failure you do know than the failure you don’t.
The last time I watched “Breaking Point,” it was after “Eyes on Dardoch” came out. In a companion piece by Kien Lam, Dardoch admits that he’s seen the movie “at least 20 or 30 times. . . . And every time I listen to it, I have to pause and stop and be like, ‘What the fuck am I saying? What’s wrong with me?’ How am I such an ignorant, stubborn piece of trash in these moments… where it’s the complete opposite of how I am outside a competitive environment.”
I am not a Dardoch apologist, nor will I ever be. I’m not interested in Dardoch-as-jungler, but Dardoch-as-person is endlessly fascinating. There are some people who don’t know themselves, and go through life offending everyone because of that. But Dardoch is incredibly emotionally astute. It wasn’t like he suddenly grew up in 2018 and recognized where he went wrong. He’s always known his problems. Even in “Breaking Point,” he already diagnosed the issue. “I’ve always loved Piglet like a brother,” he says, “but no one is ever themselves when they’re frustrated or upset. There’s a lot of things I’ve said during scrims where I’m just like, there’s no way I’m wrong about this, where it’s just my ego talking, where obviously I’m wrong. It was a cycle where our egos would go at it in the AM and then we’d go out for dinner and be like, my bad dude, I’m sorry. But we were still ego heads the next day.”
And then, smash cut to Dardoch intensely arguing with Loco about scrims.
The thing about Dardoch is, everyone has been there. Everyone has been him. The smartest person in the room, the hardest working person in the room, the person who wants it the most. As someone who was, perhaps ill-advisedly, considered “gifted and talented” at a young age, I know what it’s like to feel like the adult you’re talking to is stupider than you, could never understand that you get it and they just fucking don’t. We’ve all been Dardoch on a bad day.
But the thing also is, most of us can’t afford to be Dardoch. We’re not so indispensable that we can literally tell our boss’ boss, the person who is signing our metaphorical paychecks, to shut up because we’re talking about how we feel. We can’t make demands about what kind of coworkers we want, or get fired and then immediately rehired because we’re just that good. Like Kien writes, “There isn’t anything inherently wrong about Dardoch thinking he’s better or thinking his teammates underperformed. It’s more about how he vocalizes (or doesn’t vocalize) that.” Those of us who aren’t Dardoch have had to learn to grovel, to keep it in, to rage privately and to our best friends. We’ve had to learn what it’s like to fuck up and accept the consequences.
The thing about Dardoch is that he’s a lesson in how hard it can be to change. Self-awareness is always just the first step. We’re multi-faceted, like “Breaking Point” or Maison Ikkoku. Each time, we show a different side of ourselves. Dardoch is both the person who loves Piglet like a brother and wants desperately to see Piglet to succeed — and more importantly, be the person who helped Piglet succeed — and also the person who types in all-chat bye piggy. Because really, the hardest thing to learn about getting along with people is learning how to get along with yourself.
(This post is part of 12 Days of Esports for 2018.)
