Punching Day: Street Fighter: The Novel, Part 2 🌭

Previously, on Part 1 of Street Fighter: The Novel…

Nothing.

And now for Part 2.

Alright, fine. Here’s a synopsis.

Yeah, now you agree with “nothing.” That’s everything that happened for over a hundred pages. There wasn’t a single Street Fight in this, a novel about Street Fighter. It’s like writing a Doom novelization without any Mormonism at all-

That’s right. Credit where credit is due, there was a graphic full-frontal spanking scene with a young child. That kid was named Kenji and he got his ass handed to him, literally. If you could’ve seen the Street Fighter-style HUD, Kenji would be K.O.’d and the two grown men would have completely yellow bars, save for a sliver of red from when Kenji’s wildly flailing genitals hit them.

But hey, Kenji turns out to be an important character. Ryu left that scene vowing to care for this child forever – even breaking his vow not to murder, should he ever meet those spankers again. It’s an important bit of growth, showing Ryu maturing from a selfish lone wolf to a caring protector. I’m sure it will play a huge part in the story, so I’m going to highlight every single Kenji passage in Part 2.

But first, your favorite original character and mine, director Rob de Chow. Fat, horrible Rob de Chow, who talks like the first draft of Temple of Doom that George Lucas doesn’t want you to see. Rob is not just a racial caricature. He can also molest!

Los Angeles. The city that eats young women. They ride to LA on a dream and leave it in a body bag. Some actresses will do anything for their chance… at fresh air.

That’s the problem with Talyn’s writing – well, a problem. One of the problems. A single grain of problematic sand on a beach made of problems. That smog line is supposed to be a throwaway to set the vibe – sleazy LA takes advantage of young actresses – but Talyn botches the description so badly it scans as a woman dying in a smog bank. She whiffed noir so hard she wound up accidentally doing a Spaceballs gag. Incredible.

We focus a lot more on Tawnya’s fake relationship with Fei Long in Part 2. Now, if you’re not familiar, Fei Long’s backstory in the games is “what if Bruce Lee’s legs were on fire”? Here, it’s “guy who can’t fuck hates his bitch girlfriend almost as much as Street Fighting.”

That’s two things he has in common with every Street Fighter character. We get a look into Ryu, Ken, Guy, and now Fei Long’s minds and it turns out during every match in every game they’re really thinking “well, this fucking sucks. I wish I was somewhere else, burying my bitch wife.”

In a moment of desperation, Tawnya is so overwhelmed by her conflicting feelings for Fei that she turns to drinking. That’s right, she has an entire one glass of champagne about it. Talyn writes about this Junior High pre-game like it’s the pivotal moment in a D.A.R.E. video. Or maybe more like she’s sarcastically describing pathetic Earth hydration to alien thought-swarms, but that’s kind of how she writes everything.

If you haven’t read Part 1, you’re wondering why I’m picking on an ESL fifth grader’s first fanfiction. It’s true this is some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen, but I wouldn’t be covering the book at all if it weren’t for Talyn’s rabid marketing efforts. She created her own page on the official Street Fighter Wiki implying this is the best novel ever written, and that it might’ve been endorsed by Capcom as canon. It isn’t, and it wasn’t. She is a fully-grown British woman using every marketing grift at her disposal to make this seem like more than what it should’ve been: a 700-word Tumblr post with no likes.

Some real simple writing rules being broken here: Don’t write with a thesaurus. Don’t write horny about race. Don’t compare girls to fruit.

This may be an intentional technique. Talyn writes so overwhelmingly wrong that you can’t help but let some of it slide. In Street Fighter terms this is like sweeping your opponent every time they get up and then, when you screw up the timing, turning around and blasting diarrhea all over the controls so they can’t counter. Everything you just did sucks, but it’s probably going to be overshadowed by the shit shotgun.

An example: In the book, Sakura writes a gossip column to make it seem like Tawnya is stalking Ryu. That’s something I also struggle with – mimicking gossip-style writing. It’s hard to nurture that kind of self-hatred for a whole paragraph. I deal with it by looking up actual gossip columnists and aping their structure. Talyn deals with it by not knowing what a magazine is, typing like an adjunct professor who’s recently had their brain hemispheres severed, then removing every fourth word.

You’ll agree her prose is a crime which should be punished with snakes. But Talyn’s not done! Before you can drill down into this word malfunction, she’s already segueing into a review of Tawnya and Fei Long’s movie-

Shit shotgun!

What were we even talking about? I think I brought this up to pick apart the gossip column bit – but is this a kung fu movie about a pussy that turns men to gold? Talyn’s style guide is the fascist playbook: Flood the senses with garbage and trust on the human mind to shut down in defense. And it’s working, I started out ready to criticize her writing and now I’m just thinking how I wish I was watching a movie where Jackie Chan fights a woman with a golden cooch.

It turns out Fei Long hired Sakura to write that hit-piece at the behest of Rose, who is astral projecting as a vibrant cherry-mouthed phantom to make Tawnya think she’s schizophrenic. This is a Street Fighter book. At any point in this convoluted soap drama, Fei Long might screech like a chicken and unleash a flaming jump kick. That could happen!

That doesn’t happen.

My first instinct is to point out “her tone high-pitched and loud” isn’t how you write an upset woman, it’s how you transcribe a kettle at a school for deaf Italians. My next impulse is to ask why everything is thrusting. All of it gets obliterated by the shit shotgun when Fei Long has that ADHD lapse about furniture appreciation. What the fuck was that?! Now it’s the only question I want answered, and everything else gets to slide. I guess describe the couch that distracts from a psychotic break, if I have a note?

Back to Guy’s storyline. Now, this is complicated: you have to remember Guy, like every Street Fighter, mostly just hates his bitch wife and Street Fighting. That’s his personality, motivation, and plot.

But there’s a complication!

He also wants to bang his bitch wife’s sister.

But there’s a complication!

He wants to bang the sister in the same house, at the same time as his bitch wife. And I get it: When the love of Street Fighting dies in your heart, you have to replace it with something equivalent. Guy is just trying to play the Turbo Hyperfighting Championship Edition of infidelity.

Back to Ryu’s storyline: remember he started this book by nuking a Japanese ninja village with a fireball because a goth girl got too close to him – a metaphor that’s happened to the best of us – and he has refused to do anything interesting since. I guess he rescued that one spanked child, cared for his genitals, and promised to protect him forever. I forget the child’s name. This next passage will surely remind us.

After the spanking scene, Ryu immediately left the country to eat an insane breakfast an AI would put together after scanning Waffle House police reports. He probably brought the spanked boy with him. He did vow eternal care for those genitals, remember. It’s just that this chapter isn’t about their burgeoning father/genital relationship. It’s mostly here to reiterate the most important motif of the book:

Street Fighters can’t fuck, and hate their bitch wives.

Wait, holy shit. Hold on! Drop everything, especially any freshly-spanked boys! There’s a Street Fight in this Street Fighter book!

Don’t get overwhelmed by the shit shotgun. Ignore the wild adverbs, the kick that pushes, the Greek chorus of fight hobos, the fact that Talyn thinks bellowing means singing – none of it matters! We’re getting a street fighting scene and it’s only 16 chapters into the Street Fighter book!

You know fistfights, right? Mostly shoulder-striking? Like you really gotta laser focus in on that big shoulder muscle and make sure all your blows land there. We didn’t know that back in the day. We used to think fights were all about knockout blows, and then UFC 1 happened. Remember? When Royce Gracie dead-armed all of his opponents into submission and changed the game forever?

I’m being unfair. Sakura does manage to get off one fireball, and Tawnya counters it.

It puts both of them in the hospital.

Guy overreacts a bit.

This is actually great grounding for a comedy skit: set up fantasy conditions and subvert them with real world results. Like the announcer says “ROUND 1! FIGHT!” and Sakura starts charging up a fireball, then smashcut to both of them in the ICU burn center. If Talyn meant that as a joke, I’d applaud it.

She treats it as a heartrending tragedy and spends several chapters being weirdly horny about it.

Meanwhile, Fei Long has returned home to Kowloon, where it’s revealed he’s only been obeying Rose to save his neighborhood from triads and inadequate deodorants simply not pH-balanced for a man’s needs.

Now that the seal has been broken, there are Street Fights happening all over the place! By which I mean two. Here’s the only fight Fei Long has been in this whole book. He is instantly exhausted by it.

Ugh, Street Fighting am I right? Just the worst.

Fei Long’s character in particular is all over the place. One scene he’s Brucesploitation Christian Grey, the next he’s a sweaty little toad. Talyn wants Fei Long to simultaneously be a dreamy, powerful, charismatic sex symbol, and a scheming abusive loser who can’t fuck. He’s playing both kinds of Bill Paxton role at once, basically.

Complete with all the sniff play you’d demand from classic Paxton.

There’s actually a genuinely cute moment where Ryu plays Street Fighter against the child he’s sworn to protect forever. What was their name again?

Oh, right. Sakura.

I’m sure Kenji will come up again. He must be an important character, otherwise including that whole chapter about his graphic dong-dangling spanking and Ryu vowing bloody vengeance on his spankers would be completely fucking crazy.

He’ll come up again. Any minute.

But first a pointless Dan Hibiki cameo!

Dan’s a great joke character. He’s basically Mr. Satan from Dragon Ball Z. He’s Steven Seagal inserted into the roster of a fighting game – only it’s not Seagal from the movies, it’s the real narcissist who can’t actually fight for shit. Dan is also used as a disguised bit of self-deprecation, owning how ridiculous the power creep has become in the Street Fighter universe. People generally fall into two camps on these kinds of characters: Folks who get the joke and love them, and folks who think the joke is “we hate Dan.”

Back in the 2000s we had a word for people in the second camp, but it was wrong of us to say it, and I’m sorry.

Anyway, we all know what this was building to. It’s actually pretty insulting to force us to endure 200 pages of excuses for why you wrote it, when we all instantly knew why this book exists: It’s time for the author’s blatant self-insert to go on a date with Ryu.

Talyn probably spent hours just on this moment, plotting every second of the perfect romance in her head. Here’s what she came up with:

If I had the ability to generate and shoot a Hadouken, I could not imagine a world in which that line is met with anything but a pointblank fireball. Not even because of the idiocy or awkwardness, but because that’s plainly a podperson coming out of the closet. That’s not even close to a human sentence. Anything talking like that is not a woman, it is a woman-shaped fruit who needs your meat to plant her seeds. That’s why her hair smells like that. Ask Fei Long.

Maybe you’re a saint, maybe you’re thinking “the author is just trying to sell how nervous and dumb she would be on a first date with her fictional crush. We’re supposed to hate this moment.” No. Fuck you. This is why you have to be murdered to become a saint.

Ryu hears this – the dumbest thing ever said by man or panicked turkey accidentally making human sounds as it’s devoured by coyotes – and thinks “that is way too clever, she’s up to something.”

Imagine watching somebody rollerskate in front of a speeding garbage truck and thinking “ah, a masterful opening gambit. The game is afoot!” This is like starting a chess match by turning around and firing diarrhea all over the board. I’m sorry, I know I’ve used that before. There’s simply no other metaphor for it.

But there’s a good reason Ryu thinks Tawnya’s unbearably clever: Ryu… is also an idiot.

Everyone in this book is an idiot, because Talyn herself is an idiot. We are about 200 pages in and Ryu changed out of his ragged karate gi for the first time just for this date. “How would she know I enjoy fighting?” Thought the bare-footed karate hobo who travels the world searching out new and exotic concussions.

In Talyn’s mind, what should be on the page here is a careful tete-a-tete – ostensibly a friendly date, both sides are secretly probing the other for weakness. What’s actually on the page is two newly-awakened coma patients struggling to reconnect their speech centers. What’s implied off-page is a depressed rehab aide, quietly giving up on them.

“Gasp, he asked me why I wanted to know – the one move I wasn’t prepared for! Quick, to swallow this fork as a distraction! Gork. Sporgle. Checkmate.”

Ryu just discovered this woman whom he already knew was possessed by the dark power of Akuma might be associated with Akuma somehow. He solved this mystery when he saw Akuma’s symbol tattooed on her.

Now that Ryu finally has confirmation of the thing he already confirmed in the first chapter of this book, there’s only one course of action left…

He cums.

And then punches her in the face.

This is the real world equivalent of Ana de Armas taking Rampage Jackson to dinner at Nobu and then getting her nose caved in before the drinks arrive. As the police haul him away, the paparazzi flashes illuminate his stained jorts.

I take everything back. What a perfect scene.

I’m all the way invested in this, the story of Kenji the spanking boy and his precarious genitals. Let’s find out what happens to those genitals in Part 3 – I hope they continue to be cared for!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: AnAndy, who picks Dan even in Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. Not just that, but he has also been taunting you the entire time you read this article.