thatdemoguy
THE GREAT SEAN DEBATE
Look at this character.
Now ... look at this character.
What if I were to tell you that these two were supposed to be the same character? Well they are! So what do you see different? Be very honest, it's ok.
If you noticed that the character seems to have changed ethnicities between pics, then you would be right. And this is causing quite the fuss currently, and for good reason.
The character is Sean Matsuda, who was introduced in the Street Fighter III series. He is the young protégé of Ken Masters. A friend to Ken's own child, Mel. But most importantly Sean is (or rather was) a black character. Well it appears that between his last playable appearance in 1999's Street Fighter III: Third Strike and the upcoming Street Fighter V (due out in ONE WEEK), where he is UNPLAYABLE, Capcom has made the character go through quite the radical transformation. Gone are his undeniably Afro-Brazilian features. He no longer has the twists, he no longer has the earring, and he no longer has the skin tone. These have all been replaced for decidedly more Caucasian look. He is now sporting the popular faux hawk, with curly hair, and his skin tone is much lighter. Mind you this character is supposed to be from Brazil, where more caramel to olive skin tones are commonplace. But this is his sister, Laura who makes her debut as a playable character in Street Fighter V.
Now, all talk about hyper sexuality aside, this character does indeed look to be from Brazil. Plus by this being her first appearance, its easy to accept her look as is. But I question how does Capcom justify changing Sean, who is an established character, literally from one race to another. This not only presents an issue with continuity, but an issue with class, culture, and racial sensitivity, that will HAVE to be addressed. Sooner rather than later.
Traditionally, in Japanese fighting games, the African American characters all fall within very key and very defined roles. They also play into very obvious stereotypes. They play sports, are boxers (yes I know this is also a sport), are thugs/villains, or they are over exaggerated stereotypes of aspects of black culture. Look at characters like Balrog, DeeJay, Dudley and now Street Fighter V's Birdie. All of these characters are of African American descent and they all fall into the aforementioned criteria. And those are just from the Street Fighter series. If I wanted to extrapolate on the topic further I could bring up characters from KoF like Heavy D, Lucky Glauber, and Duck King. Now I'm not saying EVERY character is a racial stereotype, Namco Bandai seems to know how to do characters of color and make them a lot more nuanced. Look at characters like Eddy Gordo, Christie Monteiro, Bruce Irvin, and Raven from the Tekken series.
So what exactly is the problem?
The problem is that the character of Sean spoke to a generation of African American youth, who saw him as a character that instantly caught their attention because he looked like the youth of the time. He was young, he was hip, and he wasn't a joke, he stood right up there with Ryu and Ken. He was a character that could be related to. Yeah, he did fall into the obvious stereotypes by carrying and shooting basketballs in match, but he was still a visually appealing and aesthetically pleasing character that pulled in a key demographic. Now, while they did alter the character's moves and made him nearly unplayable from New Generation to Third Strike, they never went so far as this has now gone.
Some are saying that the pic in question may just be bad lighting or a case of simple artist's interpretation. I really hope that this is the case, but at this time I feel this is part of a larger issue that cannot be ignored any further. It won’t affect sales of the game by any means, but this cannot be allowed to continue as is.
What do you think? Feel free to sound off in the comments here (which link directly to my Facebook) or hit me up with a tweet at thatdemoguy.