Since entering public use, the internet has been an incredible boon for people looking for a community. Whether you trawled fan websites for various Final Fantasy VII characters back in the early ’00s or hang out on Discord servers for your favorite Youtube channel now, you’ve probably experienced the ease with which community can be found, if not necessarily joined, on the internet.
The fighting game community, or FGC, is a great example of these competitive communities. The FGC is a broad term for a broad group of hundreds of games and thousands of gamers. Industry titans like Street Fighter, beloved cult classics like Melty Blood, and entertaining curiosities like Ultra Fight Da! Kyanta 2 all fall under the FGC banner, and each game has its own group of devoted streamers, players, and fans keeping their game alive.
At the same time, video games have historically been difficult spaces to navigate for members of the LGBTQ+ community. On the one hand, the anonymity and customization options afforded to players of MMOs like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV has allowed queer people both in and out of the closet to experiment with identity and presentation in a relatively safe, controlled environment. On the other, you have data like this 2019 report by the Anti-Defamation League which found that 35 percent of LGBTQ+ gamers reported harassment based on their identity.
Queer fighting-game players have experienced much the same harassment that queer gamers have experienced in other spaces: misgendering, slurs, and threats of violence. The first time I was ever called a homophobic slur was while playing a fighting game, and it’s not hard to find similar behavior in the FGC, often directed at more popular and visible queer members of the community.
Casual misogyny is also a persistent problem in parts of the scene, with femme and transfem players’ knowledge and skill at the game being discounted or downplayed. When talking about treatment as a commentator versus as a player, Super Smash Bros. commentator Dara M. Gar explained, “People definitely underestimate my knowledge of the game … The kind of criticism that I can get as a commentator is really bizarre. People wouldn’t even listen to the things that I’m saying. They say that I don’t know anything about the game.”
These days, players from marginalized groups mostly get harassment in Twitch chats for both individual and tournament streams, or on social media sites like Twitter or Reddit—but in-person harassment has been and still can be present in the community as well. So present, in fact, that back in 2012, on a Capcom-produced show meant to promote the then-upcoming Street Fighter X Tekken, the popular Tekken streamer and commentator Aris Bakhtanians felt comfortable saying, “This is a community that’s, you know, 15- or 20-years-old, and the sexual harassment is part of a culture.” The day after outlets like Giant Bomb reported on the quote, Bakhtanians released a statement apologizing for his comments while also defending himself by saying, “I was very heated as I felt that the culture of a scene I have been a part of for over 15 years was being threatened.”
But 11 years is a long time for any scene, and the FGC is in a much different place, especially with regard to how it views queerness and treats its LGBTQ+ community members.
Of course, fighting games are no strangers to LGBTQ+ characters. Bridget and Testament from Guilty Gear are two of the most prominent examples in recent memory, but queer representation in fighting games arguably goes back to the genre’s roots in the late ’80s. While no mention of it was made in the original Street Fighter, the gentlemanly British fighter Eagle, whose design was inspired by bisexual icon Freddie Mercury, is implied to be gay in later appearances. Other games like Mortal Kombat, Tekken, and BlazBlue have included queer or gender-nonconforming characters in their playable rosters at various points.
In the competitive scene, queer players have risen to the heights of their respective games. The most popular of them all is Dominique “SonicFox” McLean, who has won major tournaments across multiple games including Mortal Kombat X, Skullgirls, Dragonball FighterZ, and seemingly any fighting game they decide to pick up for more than a couple months. Claire “UMISHO” Harrison, a trans woman, took home the top prize for Guilty Gear Strive at the 2022 Evolution Championship Series (EVO), one of the largest fighting game tournaments in the world. Other players like Ricki Ortiz, Dawn “Yohosie” Hosie, and Mia “Mira” Reshel have also won or placed highly in major tournaments for their games.
Even beyond top player representation, however, the FGC is one of the most diverse communities in esports. Whether it’s tournament organizers like Montreal’s Ishmael Cohen-Scali, casters like Gar, or even developers like Mane6’s Lindsay Towns and Jen Barboza, queer voices can be found in practically any game or role in the community. If you go to any local fighting game event on any given week, you’ll almost certainly find a trans girl practicing some fighting game you’ve never heard of before on the setup she brought from home, and she will teach you how to play it if you stand there long enough.
So how did we get here? What makes the FGC specifically so diverse?
Jamaal “Ryyudo” Graves, a player, commentator, and occasional tournament organizer, mentions the historically diverse casts of characters that have been a staple of the genre since its inception. He says that fighting games “have done extremely well about shying away from strictly straight white male casts, doing more than most games of earlier decades and even today. Having more characters meant fleshing them out in unique ways. So we get the World Warriors of Street Fighter when, around that time, NES classic Punch-Out!! might have been the closest to matching that variety. Players attached to these characters and still do years later; Chun-Li as a strong woman in gaming is one of the best examples. When done with good intentions, we’ve received strong representation and empowerment within fighting games.”
Cohen-Scali says the same, and also cites fighting games’ “arcade roots” as a contributing factor. “Arcades were a cheap and centralized place for people to meet up and play games with others, cultivating a local community and culture centered around these games. Arcades could also be connected to bowling alleys, movie theaters, or other smaller businesses that let them recoup the cost pretty easily, even in poorer neighborhoods, because of the low barrier to entry for the games.”
Even with the advent of the internet and online play, the genre’s arcade origins have remained a cornerstone of FGC culture. Attending local casual events or offline tournaments is still considered the best way to engage with the community.
This focus on in-person events has helped queer people, particularly those transitioning to new identities with potentially new names and pronouns, feel safer and more comfortable than they might otherwise feel in a competitive gaming space. Some community members, like nonbinary Montreal commentator Molli, even use the FGC as a safe haven where they are able to fully express their identity in ways they can’t at home or at work. Molli called this being in “FGC mode.”
Parts of the FGC are also welcoming to less-experienced queer players, despite the community’s reputation for gatekeeping and newcomer-unfriendliness. Despite being “more on the art and developer side than the community side” and “an absolute beginner at playing Street Fighter V,” Them’s Fightin’ Herds lead artist Lindsay Towns explained how “kind and supportive” players had been while she engaged in the sort of button-mashing play common among fighting game novices.
It’s thanks in large part to these in-person events and the more welcoming culture the community has built over the past few years that queer people in the FGC have found a way to flourish. “I think that there’s so many queer people in the FGC that there’s a level of acceptance that honestly I don’t find anywhere else,” Hosie says. “And that’s something I couldn’t really say five years ago.”
Now, some players like Cohen-Scali can honestly say that they’ve “gotten more hate for playing grapplers than loving men.”
While the FGC has improved, problematic elements of the scene’s culture are still present. Notably, in the FGC, like many competitive communities, if someone is good enough at their game of choice, some members of the community are willing to overlook their bad behavior or beliefs (such as outright homophobia or transphobia) that are harmful to others.
Changing these elements can be difficult due to the way the FGC has historically operated. California-based Skullgirls player Tuna describes the FGC not as a monolith, but as “a bunch of small, interconnected communities.” As a result, any cultural or community changes the FGC undergoes can only really happen at the grassroots level.
Even so, while finding and joining a community can be hard, fighting games offer that community to gamers that need it. For Ricki Ortiz, fighting games were where she found that she “finally had something in common with people.”
To these players and so many more, the FGC has become a space to express themselves both in-game and out, and to improve and grow as players and as people. It can be an escape from everything else going on in life, it can be a reason to get out of bed in the morning, and it can be a place to get absolutely bodied by someone with more anime stickers than buttons on their controller. “It’s like a family,” says SonicFox. “You call it a community, but really, it’s a family to me.”
