The Esports World Cup has marked one of Tekken’s fiercest rivalries with a weirdly sticky poster
Everyone loves a good rivalry, and Tekken fans have been eating good for a while thanks to Korean player (and long-time Tekken veteran) Knee, as well as Pakistani pro Arslan Ash, who bulldozed onto the scene in 2019 and has been dominating a whole host of fighting game tournaments since.
Things between the two have been getting especially heated thanks to debate around Knee’s main character, Bryan. Arslan Ash has been putting a whole lotta energy into some top-tier rage baiting, telling anyone who’ll listen that Bryan is one of the strongest characters in the game, which has successfully rubbed Knee the wrong way.
The whole thing hasn’t been helped by Knee retweeting an International Esports Foundation ban Arslan Ash recently faced around failing a drug test for anabolic steroid use—something that would ultimately have no sway on his performance in a videogame, but saw him face a two-year ban from IESF-sanctioned events from April 2023 to April 2025 anyway.
It’s certainly been veering into proper beef territory (one may even argue drama) at this point, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed by both the FGC and the Esports World Cup.
Quick note that I certainly have my thoughts on the EWC—I’m not exactly a fan of a sportwashing event run by a government with some very questionable stances on women and LGBTQ+ rights and won’t be supporting it this year—which perhaps makes it even easier to clown on this bizarrely… gooey(?) sticky(?) poster trying its darndest to showcase Tekken’s hottest rivalries of this generation.
Today 32 legends face off 👊 TEKKEN 8 at EWC 25 starts TODAY! pic.twitter.com/ZCTcCUzT4KAugust 13, 2025
It shows Knee on the left and Arslan on the right, large shadowy faces on either side. Cool! Pretty neat way to display the rivalry and advertise the tournament. Except it then also has the two walking away from each other while being held together by… an unknown substance.
I don’t want to say what I think it looks like, but I’ll let this Reddit comment do it for me: “The jizz walk in the middle has no need to be there.” As another comment put it, “They look like they had been stuck together for an entire episode and must now work together to defeat their enemies and at the end of the episode, they free themselves and learn a valuable lesson or something.”
I can count maybe half a dozen less sticky ways to convey the drama, personally. I do quite like leaning into player rivalries though, and I hope we get to see more glimpses of it at other tournaments in the future.
