Supporter Rights Activist
"Ririyang, have you ever played an RPG?"
I'll teach you how to carry as a support.
After saying that, I queued up a game and asked her.
An RPG, out of nowhere.
It was a fairly random topic—the kind that would leave anyone listening a little thrown.
Ririyang seemed to feel the same way; her answer came out hesitant and uncertain.
"An RPG? You mean… those games where you beat up monsters and make money? I played them in elementary school."
"Then this will be easy to explain. Everyone else, listen carefully and think it over too."
Casual RPG players might not know this, but most heavy users are well aware of a certain fact.
In RPGs, supports are called nobility—and they truly receive treatment close to that of minor aristocrats.
The reason is simple. There aren't enough of them.
Support roles classified as healers or buffers are forever short on manpower. Even though the pool of players who actually play them is tiny, they remain indispensable to any party.
There is no raid in the world that can be cleared without a support. Most famous RPGs are designed that way from the ground up.
Every single one is precious. Dealers and tanks can be replaced, but supports are so scarce that replacement is often impossible.
Demand is high; supply is low. By market logic, they inevitably become rare and valued.
Some people even grit their teeth and play support despite finding it unfun, just to receive that treatment—proof enough of how precious a support is in an RPG.
So, to summarize:
Supports are essential to the game.
Yet because of the very nature that keeps them from being the protagonist, few people play them, and they are treated like nobility.
"…Huh?"
When I paused my continuous explanation, Ririyang made a faintly puzzled sound.
"Did you notice something odd?"
"Yes… so, supports are rare because there aren't enough players, but that—"
"Abyss is the same."
By pure logic, that was correct.
In Abyss as well, the number of players who queue support is markedly lower than for other roles.
So why, unlike in RPGs, are supports neither respected nor valued—why are they persecuted instead?
Yes—that was the universal reaction.
The perception that supports are useless, that they contribute less to victory than other positions.
No amount of me shouting into a mic until it blew out would change that.
Seeing is believing.
Better to show them once than wear my mouth out talking.
Something feels off.
A player mid-game—Dodokbung—felt a creeping sense of wrongness and stopped in place.
The early game had felt good, yet somehow from the middle onward the match had started going strangely.
The kill score wasn't climbing as steeply as before.
Even when they did pick up kills here and there, no follow-up advantage came after—empty kills, in other words, one after another.
Something was fishy. No one said it out loud, but the whole team was silently feeling it.
An ally has been slain!
Disaster struck.
Allied Jerome had been cut down while pushing a side lane.
Unlike the kills their team had racked up earlier, this death was painfully costly.
After cutting Jerome, the enemy had gone on to take an epic monster that granted a meaningful buff.
The cheerful early-game mood turned ugly in an instant.
It was a far cry from earlier, when they'd been spamming thumbs-up emotes allowed by the game.
Dodokbung, who sensed the brewing conflict faster than anyone, hurriedly typed into chat.
Whether thanks to Dodokbung's pleading or not, the teammates mercifully didn't escalate the fight any further.
Is this even playing a game or raising kids….
Catering to these brats' moods was pure hell.
But what choice was there? That was just how these games worked.
In any relationship between people, the more desperate side always had to yield.
Dodokbung, whose rank had plummeted lately, was desperate—so he didn't refuse even the humiliating role.
This was their last chance to reverse the mood.
Looking at his teammates' shaky mental state, if they fell behind here too, defeat was certain.
So he threw the dice.
Together with their allied support, Calliope, they seized nearby vision—an ambush that exploited a blind spot in the fog of war.
How long did the whole team wait like that?
At last, prey began to approach, slow and sure.
It was the enemy support—Theodora.
Judging by the nickname alone she looked like a one-trick, and she was also the main culprit who had reduced Dodokbung's team to this state.
How she managed to zip around in every direction was a mystery; even Jerome getting cut just now had been because of that Theodora's backup.
She was only a support—nothing more than a support—and yet she was incredibly hard to deal with.
But if we cut her here.
Dodokbung was certain they could seize the momentum again.
As a support who had to take vision, she couldn't possibly avoid walking into this ambush.
They had deliberately locked down the surrounding vision, and to keep the ambush from being spotted they had even shown their ADC on the map.
Dodokbung swallowed, tense.
Come on, come. That's it. Just a little more…!
At last Theodora entered range.
Just as Dodokbung's lips curled and he dashed forward—
That was the moment.
"What…?"
The world flipped.
It happened so fast he could only form that single impression.
The vision shared from Dodokbung's hero, Dan, shook violently. His body rocked this way and that as if he were on a carnival ride.
Crowd control. CC, in common parlance.
And not just any CC—hard CC he had no way of escaping on his own.
"No!"
Landing CC the instant they had been waiting meant the ambush had failed.
No—they had been the ones baited. The ones who had cast the fishing line weren't Dodokbung's team, but the enemy.
An ally has been slain!
Double Kill!
The price of the failed ambush was brutal.
Aside from the ADC who had been out as bait, Dodokbung's entire team was wiped.
Even as Dodokbung was quietly being cast as the main culprit of the loss and the in-game chat exploded, he paid it no mind at all.
More precisely, he couldn't.
"How the hell…."
He could only mutter, looking half-possessed.
His gaze fixed on a single point.
Advance!
There stood the enemy support Theodora, her signature golden hair streaming as she held her ground.
"Even if it doesn't stand out, the position that props up the team from behind the scenes and controls the overall flow of the game—that is the support."
"Anyway—supports can carry plenty. That was what I wanted to say."
Supports are just as good as Camilla, right—?
Never look down on supports again.
If you underestimate a little support, you'll pay for it big time.
That was when Ririyang's tense voice reached me.
It was nothing like the dejected tone from earlier—even the voice itself was different.
"Teacher… I want to play support…."
Hearing that, I smiled with quiet satisfaction.