Starcraft Pro Tweets Rape Threat, Banned from Tourney

At the European StarCraft tournament Fragbite Masters, of 16 competitors invited to complete, one was a woman: one Madeleine "Maddelisk" Leander.  Earlier this Sunday, she was going up against fellow competitor Mihaylo "Kas" Hayda, and things were not going well for her.  As nice as it would be to report that the single female representative was kicking ass and taking names, unfortunately, that was not the case.  She was losing, badly, and it was during their match that “Kas” tweeted the following:

"Going to rape some girl soon #fragbitemasters."

The tweet has since been deleted, but after the match (which ended 0-2 in favor of Kas) Maddelisk wa able to take a screenshot and write a reaction to it on eSport, saying:

"I don't even know what to say.  I was very surprised to say the least. This coming from a pro player is scary. The organizers did what they could. They asked Kas to apologize and talked about it after."

Not soon after the tweet, Kas was disqualified from the tournament, and Pontus Eskilsson, head of Fragbite Masters, had the following to say:  

"First of all, I have to say that this is terrible. We will never stand for this kind of behavior, and therefore a disqualification is highly appropriate. We need to show the players that these kinds of toxic acts have consequences."

 
Not soon after that, Kas himself took to twitter to apologize for his own comment, saying “Sorry to everyone, sometime i really doing stupid tweets, hate myself for that :( sorry”

It goes without saying that since then, people have come on board on both sides: most notably, several professional players have said that she was being a crybaby and was, and I quote, a “trash player”.  Several non-professional players have also jumped to his defense, as I’m sure others have come to the defense of Kas.

Now...

It’s true that “rape” is a broad insult passed around by gamers of all genders—just about every gaming girl I’ve known and hung out with has used the term themselves in the heat of a match.  I use it as well, because, yeah, it may be wrong but it’s used so often and so vaguely that it’s lost a lot of punch. 

That said, this is a professional Starcraft player.  He does this for money.  He should be the ideal that we all strive for and a representation of the pinnacle of our culture, rather than representing it’s foul underbelly.  It was wrong of him to use that insult, then, (especially to the only woman in the tournament) and right of the tournament itself to punish him with a disqualification.  And I think the fact that he was punished so quickly is ultimately a good sign, whiners be damned.

So I’m ultimately happy about how this turned out.  Good job Fragbite Masters, behave yourself next time Kas, and Maddelisk?   Git good.  0-2 to a guy who was tweeting in the middle of the match?  Seriously, get your crap together.