>What I've really loved over the years, is the ongoing maturity of your
>writing and the subjects. A serious discussion of what it takes to
>adopt someone? Awesome.

Well, I'd be hindered slightly in examining the matter much more closely, I think, by the fact that I don't actually know what it takes to adopt someone, apart from a general idea that lawyers and some branch of the court system must be involved. It's not a process in which I have, in real life, ever had even a passing interest, apart from my odd fondness for the old television program The Judge when I was a kid. (Anybody else remember that show? Starred the late Bob Shield as the Hon. Robert J. Franklin. "... and always to temper justice with mercy.")

In an actual Street Fighter product they would almost certainly deal with this question by just ignoring it, which would probably have been my best course of action too, but for some reason that I can't really name, I feel obligated to at least take a swing at making it all legal.

The problem, of course, is that the whole concept is absurd. In anything even approaching real life, the scenario presented here would be absolutely out of the question. A real family court wouldn't send a teenage girl to live with somebody living Gryphon's lifestyle if he was a blood relative. Mind you, in anything approaching real life, the Street Fighters would all be in prison, in nursing homes with dementia pugilistica, or dead by now, so... (shrug) I guess it's a question of how much suspension of disbelief is too much to ask for. The Zangief and Blanka images are wacky and fun, but how much can you play something like this for laughs before it kind of falls apart?

I mean, think about the strategy they're discussing at the end of the fragment there. Who are their army of character witnesses? Other street fighters! The only ones who'd be likely to show up, that I can think of off the top of my head, who even have real grown-up jobs are Chun-Li and Charlie Nash. Ken doesn't do anything but be rich and famous. By the standards of the American judicial system, Ryu's a hobo. I've got a whole little speech kicking around in my head for Zangief to deliver, solemnly and with many dogged hunts for what is word in English, but it's the sort of thing that no even-moderately-realistic jurist would ever take seriously. :)

Beyond all that, there's this: Whatever process takes place, it would certainly take a lot longer than the ~six-week window that exists between Battles 05 and 06. I suppose I could deal with that by making it a plot arc that takes several episodes to complete, with some kind of temporary order in place - keeping our heroes on edge because they know that while their crazy life unfolds around them, the other shoe could drop at any time, very possibly with word of something like the Transbelvian adventure getting back to somebody at CPS. But I don't know, that doesn't sound that entertaining to me. More like the overly belabored premise for some screwball comedy manga, the type that goes on for 450 years and never resolves anything.

So I don't know. All of the above is kind of a stream of unresolved consciousness, I'm kind of jotting it down as it comes rather than trying to make a coherent narrative out of it. What it illustrates is that I really don't know what happens in that junction point between "Sakura agrees to join the regular cast" and Sakura actually being a member of the regular cast, and WL has evolved such that I'm no longer sure exactly what the appropriate tone to strike in developing it would be.

And there you are. I'm throwing it to the floor. This is a discussion forum, let's discuss something. With the understanding that I promise nothing, of course. I might think of another angle tomorrow, or in the next 20 minutes. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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