When I heard the news that Will Bosi had essentially climbed Sleepwalker in his sleep, my face turned into a Laughing Leonardo meme and I drew myself a warm bath with Jimmy Webb’s tears.

But then when I heard Will, this cheeky Brit, went a step further by actually downgrading one of the most repeated V16s in the world to merely V15, I thought:

RUDE!

Doesn’t Will know that downgrading is for the people? I just checked online, and, yep, we didn’t sanction this downgrade. Will has no business deciding what is or isn’t V16. That’s our business!

‘Scuse me, Will, but we don’t get in your way by greasing up the holds on your proj with our oily potato-chip fingers, do we? Leave the important decisions about what things are rated to us, the experts. With our meme pages and burner accounts, it is really we who are best positioned to decide what the hardest boulder problems in the world are rated.

From our point of view, there is no such thing as merely offering an honest opinion about difficulty. (We also firmly believe that pro climbers shouldn’t have opinions about anything—period.) Difficulty has nothing to do with grades! Everyone knows that grades are really just a proxy for what we think about professional climbers.

By decree, the grade of a hard boulder problem or sport climb must be tied to our opinion of the climbers themselves. OK, fine, we admit it, we could never touch these climbs. But how is that relevant? Are you blind? Haven’t you seen what people say online when something gets downgraded? All that matters is: Do we like this climber? Are they cool? Do they have visible muscles? Were they wearing knee pads? Are they Boulder nepo-babies? Do they have vaginas? Are they old? Are they taking steroids? Have they signaled that they’re on the right side of history lately? Do they just kind of seem like fucking liars with stupid faces?

Each of these variables must be carefully accounted for and analyzed by us, the grade experts who are closely eyeing climbing from the sidelines. You’ve obviously been too busy actually climbing, Will, to understand that it’s a whole process, OK? We’re not just pulling grades out of our asses! We think hard about these things. Let me try to explain it to you.

By the powers of our deductive reasoning, hashed out in the seventh rung of a Reddit comment thread, it’s pre-tty, pre-tty easy for us to do the lord’s work of deciding whether something is V16 or merely V15, 5.15c or 5.15b, and so on. We take everything into account, even including what TradLord69 and CampusBaby have to say. We know all the drama, and know where all the bodies are buried—and if we don’t, we’ll just make it up. The process concludes when a puff of purple smoke comes out of asses after we finally agree.

One big red flag is when a boulder problem gets done by an unknown. If this person’s face hasn’t been used by a billion-dollar outdoor brand to sell down vests to tech bros and puffy jackets to sorority girls, how are we to be sure that they are strong as they say they are? For all we know, they might as well be some V10-climbing mook wearing Adidas hand-me-downs. We don’t know or love them yet, so we can’t give them our permission to climb V16—yet. And if they haven’t gotten our permission, ipso facto, presto-change-o, the boulder must therefore be easier than it was originally advertised. See how that works? It’s maths.

Please, understand that this is not just a game for us. Downgrading from a distance is literally the only thing we have to look forward to in climbing … Don’t take our fun away by denying us this god-given right to be the ones who usher in the swift and delicious downgrade, when we want, as we want, how we want.

And let it be said, we’re not always in a rush, OK? The fact that we haven’t brought Alphane down to where everyone knows it belongs, at V15-, is only because we are evil cats who have not yet gotten tired of batting around this mouse. How many more weak-sauce rubes will do Alphane and try to credulously pass off their newfound V17 credentials before us with their transparent, lying grins? We laugh at them. They are our LOL-cows and we need to milk them for all they’re worth.

Let the people do their jobs. Let us be the ones to give the downgrade. OK? OK. Now that we’ve got that straight, excuse me, my bath is ready.