99.99% of the FGC that travels to events will be down money at the end. Why don’t you ask them why they go?
I’m not saying you are obligated to go to events that you feel are too expensive to justify the travel. This is a decision every person makes, whether they are good at the game or not, and skipping out on an event because “it’s too expensive for me” is a completely acceptable reason. But if your only goal for traveling is to win money, then… I think you picked the wrong hobby. There are very few people making actual money in the FGC. Ultradavid has routinely said that, as of even just a year or two ago, he had overall lost money at the end of the year when totaling up all his travel to tournaments to commentate. If you think there is profit to be won placing 4th in the occasional KI tournament, I think you need to reconsider the overall state of the FGC.
You do realize that Daigo went to community-driven events for 10+ years before he got sponsored, right? He put in his time, and now he is literally one of, like, 3 total people in the FGC that can ask for such a thing, due to being literally a top 3 greatest fighting game player of all time. I mean, the comparison you’re making is absurd. Every single person in the FGC not named Justin Wong, Daigo, Infiltration, and maybe a small handful of others are working in the trenches.
Wait, didn’t you just tell us that you liked fighting against Gargos? < digs around a little bit > Ah, here it is:
Anyway, to answer your question, no, nobody is expecting you to lie about your true feelings. Instead, we are expecting you to talk about them as if you want your hobby to grow. There are a lot of ways to say you don’t find a character to be enjoyable to fight against (today it’s Gargos or Fulgore, last year it was Kan-Ra, the year before that it was someone else, etc), and I think the KI community has consistently found the worst ways to say this.
Every community hates fighting against annoying and/or top tier characters. The difference is, the way KI’s community talks about it makes me close the stream in disgust and never go back. And that is not MS or IG’s fault.