On Feb. 4, two LCS teams who could easily reign supreme and snag the cup for themselves clashed—TSM and 100 Thieves. To hype up the audience for the match, the LCS broadcasting team prepared a segment featuring Reddit and Twitter posts on the TSM controversy that happened in 2022.
After watching the segment that dug deep into the sensitive subject of workplace abuse at TSM, Doublelift commented on his stream how the segment really missed the mark, saying it was unfair to the victims who suffered the abuse. “This reminds me of child-focused theatre, where it’s over-the-top theatricals, but for entertainment and comedy… This is not funny, this not entertaining,” Doublelift said.
Doublelift, a former TSM player himself, explained that it was weird workplace harassment and legality were featured in an LCS segment. “This is just weird, this is just so weird, and the way that it’s presented is so fucking weird if you really think about it. I mean, it’s workplace harassment, it’s like legality is involved, there’s like actual lawsuits involved… this is like a deeply traumatic series of events that happened to a lot of people, not just me,” he said.
Seeing the backlash from the community, the caster who was featured in the LCS segment, Gabby “LeTigress” Durden apologized on Twitter. She emphasized how this segment missed the mark and only further hurt people affected by these events.
To this, Doublelift replied saying the caster should apologize to everyone who suffered verbal abuse and harassment. In addition to that, Doublelift said LeTigress should remove herself as “the useless strawman where you still see yourself as the victim” and it might actually seem like an apology.
LeTigress’ fellow caster, Azael, however, applauded her for accepting the responsibility for this and explained how it was not her fault entirely, but rather the fault of the production team that let this go through.
“Takes a lot of guts to accept responsibility for something like this,” Azael said. “You may have presented it, but at the end of the day it’s the responsibility of the whole LCS team to make sure things going out hit the right notes…”
