Seeing Blanka always makes me happy in a sad way. I’m about to share something sad so sit tight real quick folks.

My dad introduced me to video games at an extremely young age and the first two games he showed me were Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat II. He’s the entire reason why I feel in love with the genre in the first place. His mains in SFII were Blanka and Dhalsim but he-

-used Blanka the most (I was a Ryu main, even all the way back then). We always had fun playing together. Around 11 or 12, it’s been so long I don’t even know, he died in an ATV accident. It was devastating to me and fucked me up for over a year.

It was around that time too and I got Street Fighter IV (so maybe I was 13 or 14) and I played it a lot. I stuck to arcade mode the mostly. I could usually blow through most of the CPUs in that game but I always got hung up on one character. It was Blanka.

For some reason he always seemed like he was more difficult to fight against than the others and honestly I always thought it was my dad playing with me. Keep in mind I was SOMEWHAT religious around that age (I almost fully converted to Christianity when I was 16).

Of course I’m not like that now (more agnostic if anything). But ever since then Blanka has always given me some form of happiness when I see him. It makes me think that in some weird way, my dad and I are still connected.

Sorry this is kind of a downer thread but I’m playing Survival mode with Blanka rn for that $ and it got me thinking about that again. My dad meant a lot to me as do fighting games and it’s nice to be reminded of the fun we had.