It is jazz. Lineups don't exist. Instead, players improvise their utilities based on their mood and the current situation. You'll never see them use those utilities in that exact way ever again, and that's what makes them magical. Tear away the veneer of practice and learned habits, and you have raw human expression. Viper walls cast seemingly at random, Sova darts that give more information than they get. An ambitious Sage who learns to place her wall on top of boxes can be found proudly standing atop a new box every round.

It is human connection. Duels are just that: Duels. There's no TTK, there's no reaction time. Two players meet each other like vagrants in the night. Their friends are far away, they are strangers to each other. They unload an entire clip at each other, sometimes all at once, sometimes in bursts between peeking and hiding. They cut each other's hair, they lick each other's toes. By the time one has killed the other, he has come to view his fallen opponent less as a stranger and more as a dear companion in a brutal world. He feels grief and mourns the loss.

It teaches contentment. Iron players know every feeling. We are the tiniest fish in the ocean of Valorant. We are the minnows, and it's the poor fish between us and sharks who come into our little pools and beat up on us when the sharks are through with them. But we accept it, and instead of passing on this trauma, we sublimate it down within ourselves and become stronger, though not better. We have died to the last bullet of a full Odin spray, we have been caught with our knives out, we have peeked angles that were clearly being held by a sniper, we have wasted a full clip and then been killed by a Frenzy, a Stinger, or a slurry of Guardian bodyshots, we have watched someone reload their gun in front of us and then kill us with it. We have felt it all. We did it again the next round. And it's okay. We have found peace.

It is true love. The same ocean teems with covetous, desirous, rapacious fish. Little fish seek bigger fish, and plot still for even bigger fish. No such delusions in Iron. Every human connection is genuine. Girls love boys for who they are and not their skill, which is little, and vice versa, and vice vica, and verse versa. There are no clout chasers, no rank chasers, no one adds anyone else in Iron with the false hope that they'll be carried to Diamond. Connections are made to deepen the individual experience in a way that only love can. Without the pretense, two gamers together can create a jazz that one alone never could, this is the power of true love.