Gaming while female is essentially an extreme sport where the opponents aren’t just the enemy team but also the guys sitting right next to you. You have to be twice as skilled to get half the respect, and even then, you usually just get told to make a sandwich the second you miss a shot. One woman on Reddit just lived through every gamer girl’s nightmare during a local tournament, and her response was the rage-quit heard ’round the world.
Our narrator is a 21-year-old Valorant beast. She has hit Radiant, which is the highest rank in the game. She even made her university’s competitive team. Her boyfriend, however, did not make the cut. That jealousy has apparently been simmering like a bad pot of chili because despite him not being good enough for the uni team, he begged her to join a local tournament with him and his friends for a cash prize.
She agreed because she is a supportive partner. And she didn’t just play; she carried. She was dropping 30+ kills a game, dragging these lower-ranked guys through the bracket on her back. She was the MVP. She was the reason they were winning. Until they lost one game. Just one.
That is when the mask slipped. The “friends” didn’t offer constructive criticism or talk strategy. They went straight to the toxic, misogynistic playbook. They started with “girls don’t belong in games.” Then they got personal, asking if her boyfriend carried her (hilarious, considering the scoreboard) and telling her to “get back to the kitchen like a good girl.”
And her boyfriend? The guy she has been with for three years? He didn’t defend her. He didn’t tell his friends to shut up. He laughed. He laughed along with the guys insulting the woman who was actively winning the game for them.
It got worse. Midway through the next game, one guy said, “Jesus remind me to never ask a girl to play with us again.” OP started crying because she is human and being gang-bullied by your partner’s friends is traumatic. Her boyfriend told her to stop crying because it was just “gamer banter.”
Let us be very clear here. Banter is friendly teasing between equals. Telling someone they are trash and don’t belong in a space because of their gender is harassment. It is abuse. And calling it “banter” is just a lazy way to avoid accountability for being a jerk.
So she did the only logical thing. She told him to go f*ck himself, stood up, and walked out of the gaming cafe. She left them a player down. They had to forfeit. She didn’t just quit the game; she nuked their chances of winning the money they clearly didn’t deserve.
Now, the toxic masculinity parade has moved to Twitter, where they are tweeting nasty things about her “unprofessionalism.” Her boyfriend texted to say she “embarrassed” him. Sir, you embarrassed yourself. You embarrassed yourself by letting your friends abuse your girlfriend. You embarrassed yourself by being the bottom fragger on the scoreboard of basic human decency.
Some of her online friends think she should apologize. Absolutely not. You do not apologize for refusing to be abused. Her university team—the actual winners who recognized her talent—are telling her to dump him. Listen to the winners, OP.
Is she the ahole? No. She is a legend. She carried them in the game, and then she carried herself out of a toxic situation. Her boyfriend wants a carry? He can find one in the kitchen since he loves that joke so much.