Hello! Welcome to the first post of OWLS´ Febraury 2018 Tour! In case you want a quick glance on what OWLS is, you can click here. This month’s blog tour theme is “Competition”.

For this month’s theme, I want to talk about one of my favorite characters in The King’s Avatar world: Ye Xiu.

For anyone who doesn’t know about The King’s Avatar, it is a popular Chinese web novel story which made its way into TV program during Spring 2017. The plot revolves around the world of esports of a popular MMOARPG (Acronym for Massive Multiplayer Online Action Role-Playing Game) called “Glory”.

The King’s Avatar is characterized to have a strong world building element, immersing the reader/viewer into its world, which mechanics and ethics are practically the same as in the real world. Additionally, it features a huge amount of characters, each one having its own set of peculiarities that sets them apart from each other. As if it were not enough, there is the element of “Teams”, like basketball team clubs, where readers/viewers can partake on cheering their favorite Team in their hearts as they moved forward in the plot.

Although the story is already finished, the fan base is very strong and it’s growing. Several “donghua” (anime) are in the planning for this series, with Season 2 coming in this upcoming spring season.

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Ye Xiu is the main protagonist of The King’s Avatar. He is a pro player of Glory with numerous achievements. He has a high level of knowledge regarding the game, high mechanical skill, and the tactics he employs are very effective, earning him the title of Great God + Master Tactician. In other words, he stands at the very summit of a pro player career.

He was signed with the team called Excellent Era. Although Ye Xiu brought many glory to Excellent Era (three time champions in the first three seasons), he was getting older. Due to Ye Xiu not wanting to appear in any sort of publicity stunt, Excellent Era decided to replace him with a fresh talent and force Ye Xiu to retire, in hopes that Ye Xiu doesn’t bring them trouble in the future.

Stripped of his position in the team as Team Captain, forced to retire by the team and not wanting remain as a training partner, Ye Xiu wandered in the lonely snowy streets.

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What you have read so far can practically sum up the career of any pro player in the real world (not only for esports): rising talent, get a lot of achievements, and then retire from the scene because of one reason or another. Afterwards, the pro player can still participate in one way or another, like becoming a manager or coach to new players.

What I’m to write here is a short excerpt of how a retired pro player struggled from the very bottom, up to the ending of the tv show in spring 2017 (with a little spoiler haha, any more and it would spoil everything, like how a football match is not fun when you already know the score).

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Ye Xiu was very lucky to stumble into an Internet Cafe that could meet his requirements of being able to work and be able to play Glory. Additionally, the establishment offered him a humble shelter where he could rest.

Coincidentally, on the date he was forced to retired, a new server in the Glory game was going to launched, prompting Ye Xiu to start anew. He would use an old keepsake Avatar with its unusual weapon, struggle it out with average online player, resist the Big Guilds influence on the online game, and upgrade his character’s strength.

During his journey, he found hidden talents among the regular online players, recruiting them under his tutelage wings, and little by little, he was moving towards the route of making a new team and win the championship again.

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As if it were not enough, Excellent Era kept messing up with Ye Xiu time and time again, not wanting Ye Xiu to get onto the pro scene again. The other guilds feared Ye Xiu for disrupting their expansion plans, searching for a way to stop Ye Xiu’s momentum.

When the new team Ye Xiu was part of got into the pro scene, nobody believed that they would win the championship the same season they entered. It was inconceivable that a grassroots team could do it. It was up to Ye Xiu and his new found teammates he could rely on to overturn this skeptical view and create a miracle.

Although Ye Xiu, as a pro player, is a very outstanding player that every team feared due to his overwhelming knowledge and prowess, he alone can’t achieve everything alone. Glory wasn’t a simple game where one person could smash everything. It was a multiplayer game that relied heavily on cooperation and mutual understanding of teammates to achieve greater things.

In truth… I really admire Ye Xiu. Against all odds, he didn’t surrender. Instead, he made the best of what he had, use his head, and work his way up together with the new team he helped build: Team Happy. Overall, it was the passion Ye Xiu had for the game that made me admire him.

“Do you like this game…If you like it, then treat everything as glory and not boasting.”

– Ye Xiu

OWLS February 2018 Theme – Competition

In honor of the 2018 Winter Olympics, this month topic will focus on the theme, “Competition” because the Olympics is where athletes from all countries join together to compete in sporting events. Through these events, we see how “competition” brings out the grit, the teamwork, and the competitive spirit within athletes. This month, we will be exploring anime and pop culture media that discusses the good and the bad when it comes to competition and what it can teach us about ourselves and the world around us.

 

I hope you enjoyed my OWLS blog post for February 2018! Next in line for this month’s tour is Pop Culture Literary so please check it out in her blog when it’s published!

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