Fantasy Robot Combat Wiki

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Even though the vast majority of ARCers live in countries that people actually care about, a few brave souls don't and aren't refugees yet for reasons that the rest of us do not quite understand. This irregular gaggle of Eurotrash hails from exotic places like France, the Netherlands, Leichtenstein, and Argentina and the only thing that they have in common is that, in addition to jabbering in their many annoying non-American languages, most of them speak better English than their British or American counterparts. As a general rule, these third-world countries are to be avoided at nearly all costs, as any Britons, Americans, or Canadians who visit will either be ruthlessly Allahu Akbarred within seconds of landing or realize that all of these places are actually infinitely more civilized than the collapsing capitalist oligarchies that they call home.

The same cannot be said for the combat robotics scenes in these places, however. In France, where everyone wears a striped shirt, eats baguettes, and bitches relentlessly about everything, it is considered acceptable to build competitive robots out of particle board, rebar, and prayer. Argentina exists solely to feel bad about Brazil being much better than it at everything except not being absurdly impoverished. The Netherlands' high point was two series of Robot Wars twenty years ago. Think about if that was your high point in life. Oh, and I think Indonesia's somewhere in Europe too, isn't it? Eh, close enough. All that they have is coffee, jungles, and sadness.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the token few ARCers from Eurotrash countries are unfathomably bad or, at least, I think they are. Nobody really pays attention to them. While the Brits generally set the low-water mark for success, rarely poking their monocled heads into the top ten, it is rare for a European team to even score a win, much less dream of passing any other active team in the rankings. For reference, the lone French team spent more time bitterly complaining about the pointlessness of existence last month than it did actually RPing. The Argentinian team has yet to completely grasp the revolutionary concept of the wheel, and the Dutch team (which was the only half-decent one) retired long ago and basically just posts conversations with email scammers and waxes philosophical about communism every so often. This unwavering commitment to absolute, hundred-percent suckage, however, is most strongly expressed by the resident Indonesian outfit, which usually spends half of its RPs handily extolling all of its robots' weaknesses for writers and opponents alike, in a bid to guarantee defeat by any means necessary.

While one might wonder why the Eurotrash bother to stick around, and the majority of the community (read: Americans) is utterly indifferent to their existence, the British are undyingly grateful for their presence, unlike in real life. This has nothing to do with genuine fondness, altruism, or even a weird mixture of sympathy and schadenfreude. It's simply because the British are frightfully insecure and terrified of looking foolish on anyone's terms but their own, and a matchup against an international team is a matchup that anyone (except, somehow, another international team) can win and a win is a win, after all. Britannia will take what it can damned well get! So, here's to a continued token international presence and free wins for all for many years to come!

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