Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games

Episode 8

“There's no way,” your opponent laughs smugly, “they'll do a third hadoken. I'll move accordingly.”

But then, you rip out your third hadoken. And a fourth. And a fifth. A sixth. A seventh. And so on. Until you've won.

This is, I assure you, peak fighting game comedy. This is the match every player yearns to have. It is simply unparalleled in how hilarious it is, and how satisfying it is to win is such a ridiculous way.

To her credit, I'm oversimplifying what Mio did. She didn't just keep throwing hadoken after hadoken after hadoken, even if that was a good slice of her match. She called out the mix-up, and struck accordingly. Still, you must understand: There's simply nothing funnier in fighting games than someone spamming the same move over and over and over again, and whether it's because their opponent doesn't know how to respond, the opponent doesn't think they'll keep spamming it, or best of all, it's a broken (complimentary) game where you just can't be stopped if you keep executing the move correctly (a hadoken in Street Fighter 6, to be clear, is far from being that), they just keep getting hit. The proud(?) recipient of a fine Fell For It Again Award.

Still, I do want to shout out Mio's opponent, who not only corrected himself when he realized that he was being misogynistic, but went so far as to hit himself with his arcade cabinet to the point of bleeding. The latter wasn't necessary, obviously, but really added to his personality. This is, I suppose, finally the week to talk about misogyny—casual and otherwise—in these competitive spaces (fighting games, trading card games, etc), which yes, fully exists. I myself am non-binary, but assigned female at birth, so when I say that misogyny is absolutely still around in these spaces, know that it's coming from both a place of observation and experience. And yes, at least anecdotally, it's pretty common for it to manifest in ways similar to how it does in this show—people assuming you don't take the game seriously, people assuming that you lucked into all your wins, people assuming you're a tourist, people assuming you're just here to impress/hang out with a man, stuff like that.

The same people (usually men) who do stuff like this, don't always consciously believe they're being misogynistic, but whether they realize it or not, they are. And while not everyone is like this—and there are players who will call out misogyny, casual and otherwise when they see it—it still doesn't make it suck any less when you're on the receiving end of it. So, good for Mio's opponent, nipping that in the bud.

But of course, Mio wasn't the only one who saw some action in this episode—even if her section, in my opinion, was the highlight of the episode. I'd be remiss to not talk about Tamaki not having a showdown with her sister, even if it was a one-sided one in her sister's favor. Tamaki is crashing out, her nerves overtaking her, setting the stage for another, perhaps more dramatic meeting between the two later.

Tamaki is a really interesting character in this series. With a more direct, concrete goal than the others, but still, to her, one that feels no more achievable. She wants to reach her perfect sister atop her pedestal, but despite her best efforts, she just can't. She stands out among the others, who more or less just want to get better for the sake of getting better, for the love of competition, and so on. I hope we see more from her by the time the series ends—both as a character and as a player, she's got a lot of potential.

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Young Ladies Don't Play Fighting Games is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.