Category: PUNCHING DAY
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This is Part 3 of the breakdown for Dream Never Ends, a Street Fighter novel. I’ll give you a little recap so you don’t have to read the first two parts, or you don’t have to read any of this. It will not enrich you in any way.
The author, Talyn Rahman-Figueroa, is a social media grifter and the kind of person who can call herself “the fairy BOSSmother” without even trying to swallow her tongue. She insists her original character, Tawnya Blaze, is not a self-insert Mary Sue. She’s simply the most beautiful actress in the world, who happens to be the same race and age as the author. Also “Tawnya” is one letter off of “Talyn.” This is like me writing a novel where Bobert Bbrockway flaming uppercuts Balyn Bahman-Bigeuroa into a combine harvester, then insisting it doesn’t reflect my own desires. I don’t know why I’m doing all this legwork. I’ll let Talyn explain in her own words, they’ll do a much better job infuriating you than I can.
Hilariously incompetent lies. This was not first in a series of novels, its weird that a Shotokan student would describe punches as “thrusting hand go aways,” I looked up Diplomacy University and it seems like a party college, and the only place listing “Hoshi” as Ryu’s last name is the 1994 Street Fighter movie. It’s a fucking sweet film – Golden Globe winner Raul Julia flies across the screen in magnet boots – but I don’t think it’s canon.
I wouldn’t be talking about this soft-cocked fanfiction at all if it weren’t for Talyn’s insistence that it’s a legitimate book. She actually wrote her own page on the official Street Fighter wiki calling this the best book ever written, and implying that Capcom endorsed it and made it canon. It’s not, they didn’t, and it’s not, respectively.
When we last left off, Tawnya and Ryu finally went on their first date, which ended with him having a premature demon orgasm, then punching her in the face. They call it the Conor McGregor Special. Let’s check in on Ryu now-
Still just wandering the streets, cumming and fireballing. Honestly, kind of living the dream.
Talyn insists this is practically Street Fighter canon, then writes every single passage like a horny pre-teen who only suspects the general shape of fucking through a veil of parental controls. If it’s a Street Fighter novel, it’s one where all the Street Fighters hate Street Fighting almost as much as they hate their bitch wives. If it’s an erotic romance novel, it’s one where the romantic leads never fuck and occasionally punch each other in the face. And yet somehow it’s not good!
I’m being unfair, almost 2/3rds of the way into Dream Never Ends we did have our first actual Street Fight. Now we’re about to have our first on-page fuck!
You know sex – that thing where you tangle your limbs together into a loose mess while the man kind of roams around on top of a woman, occasionally tickling a fulsome collarbone as the woman considers slapping him. There’s a hack ‘90s joke here where I go “sounds like my love life!” and then I’m punished with millions of dollars and a CBS sitcom.
Give Talyn credit: Ken is a consistent character. He fucks once in this book and it’s the only time he’s not actively hating his bitch wife. But baby, the second he busts? Right back to doing what he does best.
I’m no relationship expert, but if you think the only thing that might save your marriage is the morning part of a short business trip to Ohio, you lost her years ago and that thing you call wife is a fairy changeling who took her place. (The fairy changeling is also going to divorce you after the Ohio trip.)
And that’s too bad for Ken, because Eliza is the most beautiful woman in the world… besides every other woman in this book, including the author.
A real sharp-eyed, pink-lipped beauty is how I might describe a healthy salmon, but let’s set that aside. It’s a wild writing move to jump POV mid-chapter to a brand new, unnamed character who has never appeared before and never will again, only to live out his silent makeout fantasy. One he never speaks aloud, and does not affect the story in any way. This passage shows such a fundamental lack of human storytelling. I know Talyn really wrote this book, but it’s also something an AI would do if you fed it only lipstick ads and asked it to write a taxi company’s sexual harassment course.
At least we’ve broken the seal on fucking. If Ken can do it with his bitch wife, anyone can.
Not you, Guy.
Remember, Guy is the one who hates his bitch wife. Sorry, that doesn’t narrow it down. He’s the one trying to nail his bitch wife’s sister directly in front of his bitch wife without her noticing. He tries it in the crowd at a fight where he is the next opponent. His wife goes for a beer run, and he thinks he can heft up her sister and bang her against the bigscreen – the one showing the fight everyone is here to see, the one where he’s fighting next. This can only end with an announcer calling his name and the camera cutting to Guy penetrating his wife’s sister against a screen showing him penetrating his wife’s sister against a screen showing him penetrating his wife’s sister against a screen showing him penetrating his wife’s sister-
Last time I joked Guy felt he had to replace the high stakes of Street Fighting with max difficulty infidelity, but here he is just mashing buttons. He’s supposed to be the greatest ninja from an ancient line of ninjas. What is an affair but a penis-based stealth mission? You should only know a ninja is cheating on you when your sister gives birth and the doctor comes up holding a cloud of smoke.
Talyn is trying to write “sexy, high-stakes public affair,” and chose to do that by having her characters pork on the 50-yard line at the Superbowl. Then one of them gets up and says “uh oh, I’m playing in this game!” Maybe he puts on his helmet and waddles into formation, then catches the game-winning pass and runs it 47 yards for a touchdown – all with his dick out. Sorry, I got distracted writing an accidentally great scene.
The only thing that saves Guy is the sister’s inability to work a belt buckle, which actually should be the yardpost for a person’s ability to consent.
Rena finds her bitch husband, whom she hates, and her bitch sister, whom she hates, dry-humping against the Jumbotron, and she simply waits for him to cover his boner before handing him a beer. This is a marriage at the Short Trip to Ohio stage of failure.
Haha Rena tries to transfer ownership of her husband like a used Hyundai. All signing the back of the title with an X, writing “my sister’s vagina” under the mileage report.
While his bitch wife is up in the bleachers swapping him like a Magikarp, Guy is down in the ring facing his opponent: Ken Masters. Now, you have to remember that just seconds ago this master ninja’s boner was defeated by a belt buckle. He’s probably still half-hard while fighting Ken, and we all know if anything traumatic happens to you with a partial erection, that becomes your fetish. Those are the rules of the curse.
It’s a one-sided match. Guy’s as bad at Street Fighting as he is at fucking. Ken’s up there spin-kick goofin’, seeing if he can work a little jig into a Hurricane Kick just to keep himself invested, meanwhile Guy is on his knees eating a foot buffet and trauma-cumming himself dehydrated.
Here’s a technically accurate way to quote that passage about Street Fighting: “Ken’s technique sucked him, trapped … until … Guy crashed to the ground, coughing out … a mixture of fluids making its way out of his throat.”
Ken’s about to beat off Guy for good when the lights go out, there’s some motion in the dark, and both men die of broken hearts. I’m not being poetic about a gay cowboy romance. That’s how Talyn writes Akuma’s “Raging Demon” super – the one where the screen goes black and little flashes go off. I am simply too exhausted by it to properly make fun of it, so let’s focus on the aftermath: The Raging Demon destroys both Ken and Guy’s hearts, which isn’t a big deal – they both get heart transplants. Also not a big deal. It’s a little like trading a used Magikarp husband to a hated sister. Mostly a paperwork thing.
No, the really big deal is Akuma’s pressure point nerve strikes – the ones that leave their victims with very specific, horrible nightmares.
The idea that there’s a point on the body you can jab to give someone custom-themed night terrors is something George Dillman would call “next generation thinking” and charge $99.95 for. There’s martial arts magic nonsense, and then there’s dream pokes. I can’t fully explain why nightmare nerve touches are stupider than punch fireballs, because if I could I’d be making literally dozens of dollars as a karate YouTube grifter instead of stuck here reading this book.
Ryu and Sakura head off to confront Fei Long, who they believe is possessed by the Dark Hadou, and responsible for Guy and Ken’s attack. Ryu’s reasoning for this is simple: Fei Long is an artist. The vilest profession on Earth.
Fei Long’s an actor, and that’s basically a Sith with veneers. Art is the darkest of all desires, for all artists must perfect a project before moving on – even if it means murder. Hey, is that editing? Is that Talyn’s cum-brained way of saying editing? Is that why she never does it? Maybe not cutting that full chapter about a wang-waggling underage spanking was actually a moral stance.
Oh hey, speaking of Kenji, the little spanked boy Ryu vowed to care for forever:
He’s not in this scene.
We finally learn that Tawnya is the one possessed by the Dark Hadou, something both the reader and Ryu knew from the first page. She kisses Ryu like a snake eating a watermelon, and they both face their undeniable feelings for one another, though circumstances beyond their control will forever keep them apart. You know this old trope, it’s Romeo and Juliet.
If Romeo killed Juliet with a flying uppercut.
The real twist: Tawnya wasn’t possessed by the Dark Hadou, she was actually possessed by Rose… who was possessed by the Dark Hadou. That’s not actually a twist. It’s barely a parenthetical. By-proxy devil possession is still devil possession according to Mississippi law, and prosecutable by horse execution.
One of my complaints is addressed in the finale, and I really wish it wasn’t. There are indeed more Street Fights as we enter the last 20 pages of this Street Fighter book.
“You’re writing a Street Fighter novel? Haha, what does that mean – like fireball, fireball, block, insert quarter?” is what Talyn’s boyfriend said when she told him she was writing this book.
“N-no, it’s more than that!” is what Talyn said, frantically taking notes.
In the middle of this epic fight, where each character takes turns saying the names of moves that they do, Ryu flashes back to his training. When he was but a young boy under the care of his elderly master, Gouken. Let’s check in on that sweet moment:
Let’s check right the fuck out of that moment. Holy shit, how do you combo cancel out of an anal bead taming?
Asking for a friend.
That I have tamed with anal beads.
I barely need to tell you how this ends. Ryu is mercilessly beaten by Akuma, who’s come out of Rose, who’s come out of Tawnya. Just a nesting doll of Japanese karate demons but again, not as rad as that sounds. It becomes clear Ryu can’t beat Akuma with his skills alone. Close your eyes and picture the first thing a hack would write. Actually, don’t bother – Ryu will do it for you.
Ryu realizes his true fighting power comes from love! And then he defeats Akuma with the one thing no demon could give him: A hug.
No, it’s a huge fireball.
Love is a huge fireball. I’m no hypocrite, this ruled when Krull did it, so I guess it gets a pass. Just remember: Whenever you quarter-circle forward and punch, you’re really saying “I love you.”
Ryu uses the power of love to shoot a fireball so enormous it somehow brings his dead master back to life.
I’m not cutting anything. That was all the explanation we got. Gouken was just chilling in the afterlife when the door to nirvana exploded and Buddha got obliterated in a wave of fire, so he grabbed his boy-taming beads and stepped through the smoking hole back to Earth to see what’s up.
That’s the end of the book.
Maybe you’re wondering what happened to your favorite characters. Remember Ken and Guy were both laid up with heart replacements and trapped in the karate poke nightmare realm – which is what they call their bitch wives’ vaginas, haha up top! Also Rena just traded her husband to her sister for a broken dirtbike and two tickets to a Bon Jovi cover band, what happened there? Did she blow the drummer? Did Fei Long finally make a kung fu movie sweet enough to satisfy his dark heart? Was it the one about a pussy that turns men to gold? All these questions and more will be answered never – Talyn forgot to wrap them up here, and all the social media grifting in the world couldn’t make anyone want another one of these books.
Kenji the spanking boy was never mentioned again, and died from unprotected genitals. RIP.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: TatersTales, who realized that the real anal beads were inside us all along.
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.
I love Street Fighter, it’s the first game I was ever good at, until I tried to prove that in a regional competition at an Encinitas arcade that burned down soon after. No follow up questions. I also love struggling novelizations for video games that barely have a story. It is with great joy I bring you Street Fighter: The Novel. No, not that one. No, not that other one. Look, it’s called Dream Never Ends.
You haven’t heard of it, and that’s weird, because according to the official Street Fighter Wiki it’s the greatest novel written in any language.
This is the Street Fighter Wiki. Not one of those chump wikis anyone can edit. And you know somebody is policing it because it’s about something important to the internet, a beloved video game, and not something trivial like a female politician or an African country.
This page reads like the sock puppet account of a YA author about to be the center of a social media controversy, but fighting game fans are notoriously overzealous. Whoever wrote this wiki just got carried away by the power and majesty of the story Ms. Talyn created. Let’s see who that editor might be.
Sorry, I was trying to build that up into a surprise. When what you’re feeling right now is the opposite of surprise in every way. It’s just hard to “build something up” into weary resignation.
Talyn may froth at the mouth when talking about her own story, but when it comes to Street Fighter itself she tosses out terms like “flat video game personas” and “floundering.” That’s a little weird for somebody who just wrote 350 pages about it, but there’s a simple explanation: Clinical insanity.
Actual diagnosable narcissists aren’t unwaveringly confident. They’re wildly insecure – they can never just build themselves up, they always have to tear something else down. Even if they’re supposed to be speaking positively about that very thing. There must be some high-profile example of this behavior I could point to, something that illustrates how destructive it is not just to video game fandoms but to the entire global economy, but I can’t think of one because I’m a fucking idiot.
We’ve all read fanfiction by unhinged narcissists, because that’s all of it. Their first move is usually to write a new Mary Sue character who’s just a thinly veiled self insert. But that’s NOT what’s happening here – it says so right in the official Street Fighter Wiki.
Her name is “Tawyna,” not “Talyn.” There’s an entire one letter of difference. “Tawyna” has a W, and it stands for “WHOA, that’s no Mary Sue!” Also it’s unfair of me to call this fanfiction. This is a “semi official” Street Fighter story, which seems semi trustworthy. Elsewhere, Talyn describes the book as “officially acknowledged by Capcom.” And hey, right there on the wiki – it says there are plans for the book to be published in partnership with Capcom. Plans! It wasn’t, but there were plans!
I’ll translate from social media grifter: They were Talyn’s plans. “Semi-official” means Capcom hasn’t sued. “Officially recognized by Capcom” means the intern who ran Capcom’s Twitter account liked the book announcement tweet she @’d them in, and was probably fired for it.
This might be the meanest thing I’ve ever said, but you usually find this kind of manic spin and unrelenting ego from somebody calling themselves shit like “a Girlpreneur” or “a Personal Brand Expert.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Talyn was actually working as a diplomat-
-ic consultant.
A diplomatic consultant. For her own diplomat-adjacent brand consultancy business. But it’s legit, see: Her network includes top diplomats and celebrities like Bob Geldof and Kofi Annan!
I’ll translate again: Desmond Tutu follows her on Twitter. It might be an intern, it might be a parody ballet account, but that’s enough to count as “in her network.”
It’s also weird how Talyn’s own Wikipedia page is strangely exhaustive for such a minor public figure, and full of more over the top praise.
Again, I’m being unfair. Writing your own glowing Wikipedia page is a move more befitting a Personal Brand Expert who calls herself shit like The Fairy BOSSmother – not a dignified, trained diplomat with a tweet once heart emoji’d by @CoffeeAnnan.
I wonder what Talyn is up to today…
I’m scared that if I keep chasing this rabbit, I’m going to uncover a case of systematic corruption that has caused thousands of human deaths. I would rather make fun of the book about punch buttons. Let’s stop learning about Talyn Rahman-Figueroa the person, and instead delve into the art. Which, as a reminder, is longform fighting game fanfiction written by an internet grifting brand ambassador.
They say your opening line is the most important. The ending line is next. They don’t say anything about your second line, and that’s good, because Talyn’s thinks you can get small cases of passing dementia. Like a headache, or a runny nose. If it gets really bad, you might have to call in demented at work.
By the second paragraph, we establish a vibe.
Stephen King once wrote that adverbs are the enemy. I think they’re more like a weird neighbor. See him every once in a while and it’s fine. See him every day and you’re going to find out which cryptids he’s horny for. Same with Talyn’s style, it’s clear she cut her teeth writing about fucking werewolves, and I didn’t mean that as a werewolf fucking pun.
First chapter. Talyn’s self-insert is cutting herself for Ryu. First chapter.
As an avid goth dater, of course I’ve traded cuts for tits. But I’ve always imagined Ryu with more discipline. If martial arts mastery doesn’t give you the self-control to avoid sharing a dark connection with somebody Madisyn from Pre-Calc once called “a high flow bitch” after her tampon fell out of her purse in class, then I don’t know what a black belt is even for.
Don’t let the vibrant cherry mouth distract you, I know you: You’re easily distracted by vibrant cherry mouths, and you always forget to bring your knife. This is why you never get to stab anybody with a vibrant cherry mouth, and I’m telling you: that’s the best stab. Just slides right in like a human sheathe.
This fight scene is pure Street Fighter though. We all remember the first time we pulled off that full 360 and hit punch only for Zangief to realize in horror he’s gotten lost in Blanka’s soft strawberry lips and forgotten his Spinning Piledriver at home.
I’m not saying a Street Fighter book should be all about fighting. A straight-up fight with nothing else going on is one of the most boring things to read. Hey, maybe there shouldn’t be a Street Fighter book at all. That’s not my business. I’m just saying if you do happen to write a fight scene into a Street Fighter book, the IP whose name is 50% fight, you need a better signature move than Playful Water Splash.
See, this is what I’m talking about. This is the prose of a werewolf fucker. You know how when you see a spider or something, your senses begin to thrust into panic? They swell unbearably, growing hot and engorged – your senses do – just before they slip into the wet welcome of panic with a moan of lusty terror? You know that totally normal feeling.
It’s almost worse to write like this when nobody is even fucking a werewolf. It’s a little weird to write Street Fighter erotica, but you do you. It’s crazy to write a guy making a fireball like he’s fucking a werewolf. If anything, that should be reversed.
There’s not a page in here that isn’t trembling, quivering, shuddering, or thrusting. This is a tired man leaning against a wall, and it reads like both he and the wall are about to cum. Talyn clearly learned to write from horny fanfiction sites. And those all tell the same story: a gorgeous but misunderstood self-insert heroine is torn between powerful men who at once dominate and are dominated by her. This whole book is like if you held start while selecting 50 Shades of Grey to unlock its Street Fighter palette-swap.
There’s only one thing Talyn doesn’t find unbearably erotic, and it’s the stinking tenements of… Osaka, Japan.
Now, pictures of Osaka might look gorgeous. You might find articles about how it’s a wealthy financial hub, an impeccably clean city, and considered one of the best places to live on Earth. Osaka’s Wikipedia page even describes it as “a showcase of the Japanese urban phenomenon,” but I bet Osaka wrote that page itself. Don’t trust it. Remember: One of Talyn’s diplomatic credentials was “lived in Japan,” so this is probably colored by her actual, personal experience.
Two things Talyn doesn’t seem to like much: Street Fighter and Japan. It’s a little strange that she chose to write a Street Fighter book set in Japan. I don’t write books about The White Lotus set in an Ocean State Job Lots. But she’s not wrong to say Japan struggles with a xenophobia problem. I think it’s probably also fair to say Talyn showed up to those apartments wearing a shirt with her face on it and offering to pay rent in exposure.
Now that she’s shaken off the psychic damage of Japanese rental discrimination, Tawnya is free to relax in her apartment the way all normal, non-insane narcissists do: By stripping nude and examining herself in the mirror.
You guys know this, right? You know the erotic touch of wet hair? Famously the most sexy of sensations, the amorous cold touch of your own damp hair on your tits? This is number three on a list of phrases you can destroy pod people for saying. If somebody whispers this dirty talk in your ear, you need to get the fuck out of there because you’re about to bone a well ghost. This is how Grima Wormtongue masturbates. This whole book is so desperately horny and it absolutely cannot fuck.
I’m starting to get kind of a Street Fighter vibe from the writing now. Stay with me: The early games weren’t so much about memorizing long strings of combos, but about learning a handful of supermoves to spam over and over again. If you replaced all the Flash Kicks and Yoga Fires with cliches like Trembling Hands and Pupils Filling with the Sights of Things, this does read kind of like a Street Fighter match. Like in this passage for example, Talyn is baiting you into a jumping attack by holding back on a Nostalgia Sense, only to punish your approach with a perfectly timed Lip Bite.
Why did you stay with me? That’s fucking nonsense by a man going mad from terrible prose analysis.
Let’s switch gears and focus on the story of Dreams Never End. So far everything in this book reads like a parrot phonetically transcribing an Evanescence video, and that’s not going to stop.
But it is all overlaid with actual Street Fighter lore. Dreams Never End takes place after Ryu kills Akuma, and believes he is being possessed by a destructive power called the Dark Hadou. That’s all canon stuff. Talyn just dares to imagine “what if the Dark Hadou was a woman, and what if I was that woman, and what if I was also a sexy international movie star?” And then she masturbates to that question for 300 goddamn pages.
There are a handful of subplots and alternate POVs to break up the action. That’s not the right word, but you know what I mean. Watch the emotional fire blaze as Talyn’s prose breathes life into Guy – if you remember his pathetic, two-dimensional backstory from the video game, you’ll know him only as the best-trained ninja in his village. As though that’s enough!
Now he’s also intuitive!
I’m being unfair again. Talyn’s Guy does have another personality trait besides “ninja.” It’s the same one everyone else has: Hornily unfucking.
There’s supposed to be nothing sexual happening in this next scene, I want you to keep that in mind while reading it. The opening chapters were about the Dark Hadou overcoming Ryu because Tawnya came too close to him and woke him up inside (woke him up). He then unleashed a fireball that destroyed Guy’s village. This scene is Guy talking to his own martial arts master about the loss of their home.
You simply can’t read that scene without mentally filling in the saxophones and eyebrow waggle at the end. This is a cellular infection of horniness that cannot be cured. The Last of Us is a big show right now – do you know about this? Have you heard about this? Imagine if, instead of cordyceps, a person could be hollowed out and totally replaced with a Tumblr fandom. Then imagine if that abomination wrote a book. Then imagine it was about Street Fighter. Then subtract the Street Fighter part again.
Talyn isn’t just dismissive of the Street Fighting parts, it’s like you can actually see her disgust whenever it tries to intrude.
“The ninja lifestyle is not a burgeoning field that appeals to the young,” is something a Personal Brand Expert would say in their book about ninjas. How dare Street Fighter show its head here, in this tender moment between an old dry hand and a jogging bottom? Master Genryusai only wants to talk about Guy dating his daughter. At one point in the conversation hei sees Guy just thinking about Street Fighter, and has some sage fighting advice:
“Knock it off,” the ancient ninja master says. “Let’s talk about who you’re like, into into. Is it my daughter? I hope it’s my daughter.”
In fact, that’s how all the ancient martial arts masters feel. They are absolutely sick to death of teaching their young pupils about harnessing spirit energy into projectiles, when they could be dishing about the dating scene. There’s a whole flashback chapter where Ryu reminisces about the lessons of his own sensei, Gouken. If you don’t follow the games, Gouken is the guy who taught Ken and Ryu how to shoot fireballs, and apparently the pull-out game.
This goes on.
And on.
AND ON.
Gouken never even gets to the martial arts training. He brought these boys to a crumbling temple to have them meditate on teenage girl courtship. Gouken is more of a sensei in the pickup artist sense. They talk about their training a lot, but Ken and Ryu really paid $10,000 each for a weekend retreat on discovering their inner Alpha. I did mean to write that Street Fighter pun, I won’t apologize.
But oh man, when we flash back to the present and Ken and Ryu, those ancient rivals, finally get together again – you know what’s gonna happen!
They politely discuss sparring and how neither want to do it for different reasons, then begin complaining about marriage. When Ryu finds an opening in the conversation to mention that he’s been possessed by the Dark Hadou and has recently destroyed a small village with a fireball, Ken knows exactly what to say.
Checking back in with Tawnya Blaze – remember she’s no Mary Sue! She’s only the most beautiful actress in the world, caught in a love triangle between Ryu and Fei Long on the set of his new movie. For those of you unfamiliar with the game series, I guess I’d describe Fei Long as milky-faced. And if you have to know only one thing about him, it’s that he loves to sniff women.
Meet another of Talyn’s original characters: Rob de Chow, the director of this film. Don’t be fooled by the name, he’s actually a deeply flawed character. There’s actually only the one flaw, but it is real deep.
We’ve got milky faces and wildly offensive Asian accents, we need to get the fuck out of here before Mickey Rooney shows up. Let’s check back in on the rest of the book. Surely we’re not still dwelling on Guy’s relationship troubles-
Or Ken’s identical relationship troubles-
I miss Ryu’s sections. I bet he’s doing something fireball-adjacent-
Ryu – Ryu from Street Fighter, the karate gi guy, whose whole personality is half-circle forward punch – is watching the ocean and wishing he could crawl back up his mother’s vagina. At this point, I’ll take it. I’ll take one other thought in my Street Fighter’s heads beyond “frustrated by CW relationship drama.” Even if it’s just that other staple of CW angst: basic parent issues. So long as every character doesn’t now start talking about their mommy and daddy problems, we’ll-
I’m not even surprised. Everyone in this book has the inner monologue of a 14 year-old’s secret alt Livejournal. This book takes place in 2005, I’m allowed that reference.
I bet this all ends at the annual Street Fighter prom with Sakura pregnant with Brad’s baby (Brad is a new Talyn original character who dies after not asking Tawnya to the dance.) This book was not a work of love, it’s transparently chasing that Twilight/50 Shades of Grey money. I wouldn’t even be surprised by a spanking scene-
I lied, I was surprised. I did not expect Ryu from Street Fighter’s ocean musings of reverse-birth to get interrupted by an underage public spanking. I definitely didn’t expect Ryu, the Japanese character, to call out the slanted eyes of another Japanese character. But let’s see where this is going. You don’t know, maybe he does something awesome in this scene like unleashing a dragon uppercut or caring for some tender genitals.
He does! He cares for the tender genitals, just like in the hit video game Street Fighter.
I take it all back, this is the Street Fighter I want to read. Stay tuned for Part 2, with hopefully more genital shielding, maybe some cherry mouths. Vibrant ones, if we’re lucky!
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sam Koepnick, who ABSOLUTELY knows the erotic touch of wet hair and will not shut up about it.