Mid tier characters are good, actually

I'll try to keep this short: I have been playing competitive fighting games for like decades at this point. Since Slippi started making competitive Melee more accessible to more players, there have been more players willing to push characters that have been previously used a lot less because of relatively ancient assumptions about how good or bad or capable or incapable they are.

That's not news, but what I find interesting is how unique the melee community is among fighting game communities for its relative disgust for mid tier characters.

My brothers in christ: mid tier characters are not bad characters. They are generally speaking, good characters with real, actual exploitable strengths (sometimes extremely powerful ones) that are viable and capable of success. They have flaws that are often harder to play around (in the case of Luigi, poor diagonal movement and exploitable recovery) but it bears saying (or repeating) that character weaknesses are not exploited evenly and equally across the cast. Luigi's weaknesses aren't a death sentence just by virtue of the fact that they exist. The same is true for stuff like Jigglypuff's weight, Fox's fall speed, and so forth. They tend to be more commonly exploitable which creates harder matchups and probably a few that are extremely difficult.

But this community will look at a matchup that in any other game people would call a 6-4 or whatever and declare that no one should ever be able to win it ever and it's pretty weird. It's so bad that when someone does, the excuses immediately start. "They'll figure out Luigi/DK/whatever and never lose again," as if those characters are puzzles to be solved. There's honestly a sort of funny mysticism about it. "The new players have lost the way of the anti Luigi tech." Some guy the other day was like "RapM would never beat Isai" or whatever.

Guys there are real people playing these characters and matches. RapM, DialM, Axe, and so forth are not chess computers nor are their opponents. Melee is a game with strong system mechanics that everyone has access to which always gives every player potent offense and defensive mixup (well, you could argue some of the low tiers don't just because of how their moves work/don't work properly lol, but I wouldn't ever say that's true for characters like Doc or Samus or whatever). There's no "solving" a mid tier character because he characters aren't bad enough that the player can't outplay. RapM lands against other players all the time. He recovers all the time.

I think it would be healthier if some of y'all started viewing those characters as being strong tournament viable options that just aren't as strong as other options. Mid tier characters have had success in games far less balanced than melee. The primary reason they haven't in this game is because no one's willing to play them because of this weird community brain poison that if you're not playing one of 8 characters you're wasting everyone's time.

If you don't believe me, go watch Zain's tier list video from a few months ago where his attitude about most of the characters from like Ganon/Luigi up is that they are good characters. They're just not that bad OK!?!