Every Ending Has Been Written, Every Tear Has Set Out

Xi Murong wrote in Youth: “Every ending has been written, every tear has set out” (所有的结局都已写好，所有的泪水也都已启程).

Only, no one had foreseen that when the rain of gold was truly denied the finals stage in Busan, the fifty million of us in the arena and before our screens would feel every hope turn to ash in the same instant, watching a result never once imagined play out, real, on the other side of the world — as though the faith that had long beat in our hearts, the hunger for a championship, came thundering down.

李相赫 once pushed up his round-rimmed glasses and said to the camera, in dead earnest: “When you lose, everything you did is wrong.” The essence of esports, put politely, is that victors are crowned and losers condemned; strip it honestly bare, and beyond doubt playing badly is the original sin. At some point the pre-match Mercedes-Benz SUV advertisement had quietly changed: “Mercedes-Benz powers RNG to the summit of the world” had become “Mercedes-Benz and the 2018 Finals bear witness together to the birth of new heroes.” Watching the six figures fade from view, my eyes stung.

With the glory of six titles in a single year upon them, RNG strode across the Korean stage draped in the dazzling robe of the strongest team on the face of the earth. Everyone was waiting for a finish as perfect as a web novel’s — waiting for what the last deciding game might hold: 香锅’s recklessness carried through to the very end, 让帝’s equality of all beings, 小虎’s micro pushed to its outer limit, 狗妃小明’s flawless reading of the whole board, and — 简自豪 locking in Vayne the instant picks opened, sealing it with a pentakill, setting the dreams of hundreds of millions in China wholly alight, proving once more that seemingly unshakable law, “persistence and achievement walk hand in hand.”

We had all thought this would be the perfect curtain fall on an entire youth, a new strength in which the nation’s pride would stand revealed.

But every bit of that stood on one foundation: that we had a champion’s strength, and that we respected the opponent in every single match.

Seven minutes — and “RNG lost” topped Weibo’s trending searches. The avalanche of fans turned haters was no free improvisation by keyboard warriors; it grew from the short videos, surfacing one after another, of the players slighting their opponents before the match. Watching the draw come out, they had burst into loud, pitch-warped laughter, all waving hands and dancing feet.

Had they crushed all before them and truly lifted that radiant trophy of supreme glory, those videos would have become the fairgrounds of a great fan carnival, screens white with bullet comments; would have become a legend passed from mouth to mouth in the history of esports; would have become a token of might before which every opponent swallowed his anger and said nothing.

But precisely because this team had swollen blind on its own air — still holding itself the world’s best after losing two games running and scraping them back by sheer luck — when G2’s Western players came up for a friendly handshake, faces brimming with thick, undissolving smiles, they bowed their heads one after another, as if their center of gravity were gone, as if they could barely keep their feet.

After the match, the casters and the crew each turned their heads away whenever the cameras allowed, none quite in command of themselves. People said: RNG was not worthy of their devotion and their heart’s blood. Through numberless screens and networks I seemed to see grown men wiping tears where no one would notice, seemed to see the disappointment and the knotted feeling of men who could not, this time, shout out that RNG were the greatest.

We love this game and the invented culture of the whole continent of Valoran; we love the countless hours spent shuttling through Summoner’s Rift as though the lightning obeyed our hands; we love its simple rules — crow when you win, flame each other when you lose.

Just as surely we remember the star players fighting on the front line of the professional league. In the dim little world of high school, that was a thread of light through the eggshell. In every break of evening study hall we would anxiously ask the big shot who dared bring a phone: who took this one? If the LPL had wrenched back the tide, the whole night turned warm. If Faker had shown the Demon King’s dominance once more, we would often go shut and silent for the rest of the evening, leaving the teacher to wonder why the homework had come out so strangely wrong.

Some avatars never lit up again after level 30; some teams, once parted, never gathered again; and every youth drives on toward a different far-off place.

Royal Never Give up.

Begun in dreams, ended in arrogance.

The ending could have been rewritten; the tears had already been reined in. But the proud army always falls, and your carelessness buried our youth and our faith.

So be it.

Goodbye, League of Legends.