I've been thinking about this series a bit lately. I lost traction on it after the unusual activity spike a few years back, when two episodes came along in quite quick succession, and I think I've come up with at least one significant reason why.

In recent years, a lot of new information has come to light on the consequences of closed head injuries, particularly in sports. Now, obviously, people never thought these things were good for you, but it's only fairly recently that it's started to get around how really, really bad they are. The consequences of repeated concussions, and the ease with which a person once concussed can suffer repeated concussions, are shaping up to be far, far more terrible than was commonly believed in my youth.

I'm not a football fan—don't really understand the game, much less follow it—but a lot of the high-profile case studies in the fallout from repeated traumatic brain injuries these days are football players, and one in particular came to my attention more or less by happenstance: Jovan Belcher was a University of Maine graduate and committed his murder-suicide while I was an undergraduate there, recently enough after his own graduation that there were still quite a few people on campus who knew him. There was, as we now say, a Campus Dialogue about the matter for some time afterward, and I've taken notice of similar news items when they've crossed my path ever since.

All of which may go some way toward explaining why I've become so ambivalent about continuing a series based on Street Fighter, which is, at heart, a game about people who travel around the world giving each other concussions. Now, it could be argued, and I have argued this point to myself, that it's set in an idealized fictional universe where, for all we know, chronic traumatic encephalopathy isn't a thing, and "walk it off with a shot of bourbon" is still, 1930s noir style, the correct way to treat a mild brain injury. It's sort of the interpersonal violence and cerebral trauma equivalent of those harmless vanilla porn stories where no one gets an incurable disease or unwanted pregnancy because that would harsh the mellow, man.

And yet, all the same, I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with the notion—which, given that it's bound up in the central premise of the setting itself, makes continuing Warrior's Legacy... problematic.

I suppose if I wanted to really explore the meta here, I'd have the characters confront this issue themselves, possibly as an extension/extrapolation of the qualms G has been having about enabling Sakura's delinquency. It's an option. What does a street fighter do if he's developing an ethical reservation about the very core of his "profession"? It's a thought. Not sure it's one I particularly want to build a narrative around, but it's a thought.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.