“Enjoy your Melee without Mango.”
Over the weekend, the SSBMRank returned with its list of top 100 Super Smash Bros. Melee players in the world based on results, consistency, and skill. The Smash community was skeptical of the results, which had Joseph "Mango" Marquez in third place after a major comeback in recent tournaments.
There hasn't been an official ranking since 2019. Now after the pandemic, Melee It On Me, Melee Stats, and other Melee organizations have come together to compile a list of the top 100 Melee players of 2022. The process includes a coveted panel of experts discussing the results from March 1, 2022 to December 18, 2022. But many in the Melee community have responded with frustration, since this includes the off-season.
One of the most outspoken in the community about the rank is Mango.
While at Genesis 9, the ranking was clearly too much for him to handle and he decided to disqualify himself from the major and go watch an Eagles game instead. After placing in 97th, Mango took to Twitter to rant about the top 100 results. He explained that he was "shafted" in 2019 and has now been "shafted" again.
"Enjoy your Melee without Mango," he tweeted.
While some fans understood his frustration with how the rankings decided, even long-time fans of the Melee God were finding it difficult to continue supporting his behavior. Mango has been known to have outbursts about tournament results, rankings, and many other things within the competitive Melee scene.
Fans also speculated that Mango has just been off because Adam "Armada" Lindgren also attended Genesis 9. The two iconic players had a dispute on Twitter late last year, where Armada accused Mango of encouraging bullying and death threats towards him. Others felt he was purposely dropping out to avoid facing Armada in a match.
Many of Mango's followers were disappointed to know that he dropped out of the tournament. It's possible that Mango is getting burnt out, something that would follow his usual pattern of dominating the scene and then falling off the face of the planet for a while. Fans were sad to see him make this decision at a major tournament, however, knowing it would impact his ranking in 2023 as well. One Melee fan on Reddit noted that he could have DQ'd to ensure his results wouldn't be part of the ranking at all. Either way, the subsequent Twitter rant left a bad taste in the community's mouth.
Said one fan: "Certain parts of Mango are enjoyable, but his god-complex with Melee is, for lack of a better way to put it, cringe as f—. Guy sandbags, loses, and then has the nerve to imply that the event is s— without him? That level of narcissism is hard for me to relate to. The guy has the maturity of a child sometimes."