So this is a controversial topic for a few reasons but eh, it seems like a vaguely positive thing to bring up for TDOV so why not? Last night I ended up taking a stab at playing Street Fighter 5, because... I'd gotten it in a bundle and have friends who like fighting games so hey

why not give the genre a shot for the first real time in... decades?

Anyway, there's quite a few reasons it turns out. Mostly due to this bafflingly hostile UX and mandatory log-in (and the fact that for reasons I fully cannot explain, this game does not seem to get along with

OBS because I've been, as you've seen, trying to do the streaming thing).

Also just... visually this is a really off-putting game. The introductory mandated tutorial and the story mode segments have this... art style... that I just cannot at all explain. So have a picture.

And then we get to the actual in-game art style which... I don't want to criticize TOO much because there's clear stylistic choices being made, and I've seen much worse on all fronts, particularly in this genre, but... I mean DAMN, just look at this.

I mean first off I'm baffled

to see that blatant of an issue with hair clipping through the rest of the model, in what is still in this screenshot a hand-animated cutscene no less (does it on the character select screen too, and gets all jittery as a result) especially when I mean, the hair in question isn't

exactly cutting edge individual strand-rendering cloth-physics hair here. That's a solid plastic hunk of a few polygons.

But here's the other thing. I am a trans woman. That means that I am CONSTANTLY being subjected to this big ol' laundry list of all the odd random physical

traits the most horribly bloodthirsty and dangerous bigots have decided, with no evidence of any sort to back them up, MUST be what trans women look like. So I spend way too much time having ghouls shouting at me about how I must have fake hair and spherical obviously fake giant

tits and absurdly massive giant hands with big thick sausage-like fingers and wear these disgusting inappropriate clothes, and then... here's every single woman in the initially playable character roster looking like the most on-the-nose caricature of all that hateful garbage.

It's kinda like turning on a new entry in some popular mainstream game franchise and for some weird reason a full third of the characters are just straight up Le Happy Merchant. It's... a bit upsetting. And it's not like I can just avoid the problem by picking one of the guys,

because... I mean you DO realize it's not a joke when every trans woman ever says "as a kid I always picked women to play in games without really knowing why and coming up with weird justifications for it, but also the men are like, Mesomorph Hell or All The Fetishes At Once.

So despite actually kind of enjoying the experience of messing around and getting a feel for it (because Street Fighter 5 it turns out is kind of on the simpler side, mechanically, relative to other fighting games I'm familiar with, with just a few special moves per character,

mostly with the same inputs, no weirdness at least that I'm aware of with crazy long combo chains or counter-counter-counter moves), I was pretty close to walking away because it's just... really upsetting to look at even just the character I am playing. BUT, a friend assured me

that over the intervening several years since its release, as they slowly rolled out new character packs and skins, as is the way of games like this, the horrifying art got better in general, so characters from the newest batch were fine. So I went grinding for in-game currency,

and grabbed the most recently added and therefore least grotesque and sloppily designed woman in the whole dang roster of like 30 or whatever. And to my pleasant surprise, she looks fine! Like, yeah, her default costume here is pretty objectively trashy. Crop top & cutoff shorts.

But by the standards of this game, or fighting games in general, even that's pretty conservative. There's no random thong-over-pants thing or ass window or total lack of pants at all like literally every other woman in the game and the crop top isn't 5 sizes too small for maximum

underboob exposure. And most importantly, it's being worn by a woman who... has a body in more or less of a shape an actual real world woman's might have. You know with hands that aren't twice the size of her head and what I assume are actually breast-shaped breasts and so on.

And the fact that THIS is the one and only woman in the game (so far as I'm aware anyway) who DOESN'T look like some kind of nightmarish caricature of what bigots imagine trans women look like amuses the absolute hell out of me.

Because she's Poison. Yes Poison from Final Fight.

That's right. The only woman in Street Fighter 5 who DOESN'T look like some kind of bigot's transphobic fever dream is the hands down best-known/most discussed/least-ambiguous/the-big-joke-is-people-don't-argue-if-she's-trans-just-if-she's-had-bottom-surgery trans woman in gaming

And I mean, the next most-traditionally-woman-shaped-character in the game is Seth. Who is... also pretty damn canonically trans, being a bit of a shapeshifter (as befits the role of that-one-fighting-game-character-who-copies-others'-moves) and chooses to look like B over A here

And I mean, it's also kind of amazing that I can't call Seth "the other trans woman in the game," both because the game kinda bends over backwards to avoid pronoun usage for Seth and I gotta respect that, but also because, as I had to have someone explain to me in the process of

explaining how the hell this series went from 8-12 broad stereotypes from around the globe in 2 (plus the other 4 they added in the... 4th Street Fighter 2, because dang this series was resistant to releasing a game with a 3 in the title for years) to having some chromed up

shapeshifter and like a Frankenstein and Roadhog-with-a-belly-window-and-chastity-belt, it turns out a HUGE chunk of general Street Fighter lore, like this is roughly the origin of half the female characters in the series including Seth there but also going all the way back to

Cammy, who was around back in Street Fighter 2 even (well, Street Fighter 2-4 anyway) is that, and I swear I am not making this up, is that M. Bison, the main villain we all know and love, has this whole like... stable of hot teen girl clones to one day brain-swap into one of.

So... yeah, as I understand it the OTHER trans woman in Street Fighter 5 (and like, every other game in the series) is this gal here. The one on the left. The one on the RIGHT is one of like a dozen idealized self-images she made by cloning herself and like... comic book science.

So I mean, it's not great that all three of these are on the more villainous side of things (although, refreshingly, the little story mode here not only makes no comment on Poison being trans but also makes it pretty clear her past as a beltscrolling-brawler mook wasn't so much

a being-evil thing as just she used to hang out with kind of a edgy group of friends before they all grew out of it and got real jobs, and the whole police hat and cuffs thing is just kind of a domme aesthetic, not an endorsement). It's also a shame these three are surrounded by

all these anxiety-inducing cis women, and in a game I was locked out of for like an hour by it requiring a unique name and having anything that isn't keyboard mashing be taken, but hey, it's still Pretty Good Trans Rep as these things go, I'd say.

I was also kind of surprised to learn the new guy with the DBZ scouter, personality wise, is just this big sappy dork. Like I was expecting Vegeta and got a Steven Universe character.

But anyway, Poison good. My ability to stream bad.