Melee Hell

About

Melee Hell is a "Facebook group"^[1] and weird facebook page, designed as a satirical response to the Melee Social Facebook group and Melee Social board on Smashboards. Brookman, a Super Smash Bros. Melee player hailing from Connecticut, created the group in late 2014, with active posting members that include Hungrybox, Mew2King and Hax, among many other both professional and non-professional Smashers, though the majority of members, mostly due to content, are older members of the smash community.

Posters on Melee Hell often reference in-jokes, such as 20XX (with Hax being their lord and savior and with everyone in the group saying they main Fox), farcical posts about Melee's perceived quality compared to other games in the series, and satirical statements about other smashers, with a large majority of posts tending to be photoshopped images.

Origin

Melee Hell originated from the "Melee Social" thread on Smashboards, when members started making anti social remarks in regards to Melee and making negative comments about other Super Smash Brothers installments. When their negative banter wasn't welcomed within the thread, members split away from the group. After a failed attempt to create a Melee Hell thread on Smashboards, the facebook page was created.

Reception

Melee Hell has been controversial to some members of the Smash community, with criticism being focused at the often vulgar and obscene content of the page; some of the content has also been criticized for being racist or sexist, as well as promoting trolling. Some followers of Melee Hell have also sent threats to smashers outside of the group; most of these threats have been targeted at female members of the Melee community, notably Shannondorf, a MidWest competitor and cosplayer, however, admins for Melee Hell prohibit such threats, and the majority of members do not approve of such threats.

Provocative users tend to post memes and other jokes on the community, most of which are controversial, leading to Melee Hell being a very touchy subject among Smashers. There are also very explicit posts made, which furthers this point. However, sexual images are usually banned, mostly due to not wanting the group to be removed by Facebook.

Impact

When professional Ice Climber main Chu Dat was dropped from Mortality eSports, Melee Hell held a crowd funding to pay for his plane ticket to EVO 2015. Due to the "sponsorship," Chu Dat wore a Melee Hell themed shirt and signed with the tag "MH | Chu Dat." Despite not being a Fox main, Chu Dat is known in the Smash community for his trolling antics. After Chu Dat finished 7th at EVO 2015, interest in Melee Hell sparked, including a tweet by top professional Melee player, PPMD.

Many smashers have used "Melee Hell" as a clan/crew name in tournaments, although it is mostly done as a joke.

Because of the large user base Melee Hell has garnered, offshoots of the group have been created, which include "Sm4sh Hell, a group dedicated to Smash 4 anti social debauchery ^[2], "M2K Hell, dedicated to renowned professional smasher, Jason "Mew2King" Zimmerman^[3], and "Squid Hell dedicated to Splatoon^[4].

Fandom

Members of Melee Hell often congregate to the Melee Hell facebook group page, where they create shitposts and dank memes in relation to Super Smash Bros. Melee and its competitive scene.

Aside from the group page, "Melee Hell also has a facebook^[5] and twitter^[6]" that showcases some of the memes that the members of the facebook group created. "Melee Hell has their own subreddit^[7] and tumblr^[8] account that also include the same aspects of the facebook and twitter pages.

Community Memes

Within the Melee Hell community, many in-jokes have been spread around or forced among the members. While these in-jokes rarely surface from the group, memes within the Smash Community (specifically Melee) tend to get the most OC spawned for them.

Leffen vs Chillindude829 Apex 2015/My B

During the upcoming months before Apex 2015, the largest tournament for Super Smash Bros. Melee at the time, William "Leffen" Hjelte and Kashan "Chillindude829" Khan got into some beef on twitter. Leffen made a tweet about Chillin for being a "has-been" player. Chillin fired back with the phrase "respect your elders" and challenged him to a 'first to 5' Fox ditto at Apex 2015 with $100 and rights to the default Fox palette color on the line. The resulting match ended with Leffen defeating Chillin 5-0, with Chillin afterwards saying "My b."

Leffen 5-0ing Chillin has resulted in many OCs and parody videos based on the event.

Mew2King

Jason Zimmerman, better known as Mew2King, is often a subject of OCs in Melee Hell. Many OCs of his portrayal often show his status as one of the 5 Gods of Melee (a coined term to represent 5 players who held a reign of dominance of winning tournaments from 2009 to 2014), his "lol m2k" moments (humorous situations regarding Mew2King himself), and "M2K Did 9/11" (a series of OCs portraying Mew2King as the true perpetrator of 9/11 as opposed to Al-Qaeda). Some members often tag Mew2King in their posts to try to get him to respond in the group. In response to this, admins now ban anyone who tag his name in their posts at the request of Mew2King himself.

Cynthia Bunnay Controversy/ Cynthia Nudes (Glowstick Hell)

Within the Smash Community, Cynthia Bunnay became infamous for her antics while she was a part of the management of the esports team Most Valuable Gaming (MVG). A rebuttal about Cynthia's behavior was posted on reddit along with M2K's response to the whole controversy that happened. While the original post was deleted, archived posts have been preserved.^[9][10] While information on her behavior was being released, news sprouted of nudes of Cynthia being posted on 4chan, that soon leaked out to other sources. The context of the nudes and other pornographic content was that Cynthia was posting sexual pictures of herself on Craigslist to obtain free amiibos. News of the nudes quickly caught the attention of members of Melee Hell's Facebook group, with some members attempting to leak the pictures to other members. To prevent the group from being taken down because of the pornographic material, admins started banning members who threatened to post any links to the nudes. Ultimately, the "Glowstick Hell" Facebook group was created for discussion of Cynthia Bunnay and the leaked nudes, with posting of nudes highly discouraged to prevent the group from being taken down.

You May Spank It, Once!

Among the more popular in-jokes to be shared within the Melee Hell community, "You May Spank It, Once" refers to a series off two-panel exploitable macros where a character, often viewed from the back with a view of their buttocks, gives permission for the viewer to spank it, and in the next panel, holding up one finger saying they could only spank it once.

The earliest instance of this post began as early as November 11th, 2014 within the Melee Hell Facebook group and would be spammed often in the community for years, sometimes being followed up with the quote "Firmly grasp it" from Spongebob Squarepants. Despite its prominence, derivatives would not rise to prominence until 2018 on Tumblr.

Community Purges

Melee Hell has been known to have "purges," the elimination of inactive members and trolls who post Smash for Wii U and 3DS content within the Melee Hell group to rile up members, because of the groups steady growth in membership.

Search Interest

External References