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Tabletop roleplaying sure is hard when you have no friends! And that’s a real problem for me because I love collecting tabletop RPG books and guides. This reveals a deep sadness within me, but they feel like textbooks for the imagination! Between art, flavor text, and the gameplay, RPG books are almost as good alone as they are in a game! And by “almost as good” I mean “God, I have never been more lonely in my entire life.” But I wasn’t going to let that stop me. To quote Hannibal Barca, “I shall either find a way or make one.”
I’ve been curious about Street Fighter: The Storytelling game ever since I picked it up about a decade ago in a used bookstore. I avoided eye contact with the woman at the counter when I took it to the register. She knew what I was buying but I didn’t need her to see me also knowing what I was buying. That is, a pen and paper RPG based on an arcade fighting game. Oh, and the art on the cover of the book is pure 1990s American-style Street Fighter 2 art. This is a book that wants to humiliate you.
And, buddy, I was alone and ready for some humiliation. So I read the book.
It’s a fun roleplaying manual because it starts with the most basic rules, tells you that’s all you need to know to get started, and then follows that up by giving you the most complex instructions possible for making a character and understanding how it works. Literally, the first 30 pages are like, “All you gotta do is roll D10s to see if you’re over the success rate!” The next 150 pages are like, “Be sure to subtract your enemy’s successes from your failures while considering whether the Move and Speed stats are matching or inverse of matching in which case the flux capacitor must be set to minimum gigawatts.”
But, I was able to push my way through and create my character, T. Robin Chadson. Yes, I know there’s a character named T. Hawk which is kind of a similar bird theme. No, I did not remember that when making T. Robin Chadson. For his part, T. Robin Chadson was an ex-con who had special forces training before being abandoned by his commander who’d pledged fealty to M. Bison. Oh, T. Robin Chadson did not like M. Bison one bit! You can take that to the bank and deposit it and wait three days for it to reflect on your account!
While I’m relatively sure I made my character wrong in at least one aspect, I had my sheet. He was a tough dude who could nearly punch through steel and almost kick through paper. Unlike me, a big ol’ fat boy who waddles to and fro, his legs are not very strong. None of that mattered. He was on a quest for revenge and he’d stop at nothing until he could get his revenge. Even if that revenge meant fighting! Especially if that revenge meant fighting! To mark the occasion, I decided to try to keep drawings of my character in action.
Now, there aren’t any solo rules in the book, so I had to make up some of my own. Then, after re-reading the rules and understanding how complicated they are…
…
…
…
… I just decided to play both sides in the fight. T. Robin Chadson would be the hero, and his opponents would be not the heroes, but as the storyteller and the player, I’d be doing both! It was an art that required careful balancing of fairness, story, and me wanting T. Robin Chadson to go on dates as well as fight.
As far as the campaign goes, I started in New York City and fought Ken to find out what he knew about Shadaloo. I said, “I need to find out more about Shadaloo!” And Ken was like, “I’m a good guy! I also don’t like them!” And I was like, “I need to find out more about Shadaloo!” And then Ken was like, “You already said that.” And then I said, “You’re right, sorry.” And then Ken said, “It’s okay. You wanna fight?” I said, “Yes” and then rolled three D10s to see if Ken was being sarcastic and making fun of me. He wasn’t! So we fought!
Combat in Street Fighter: The Storytelling game takes place over a series of rounds. Players reveal their moves and then resolve them based on speed, distance, and power. It’s fun because in Street Fighter the video game, if you push a button, you kick. In Street Fighter: The Storytelling game, you get to roll a bunch of dice and then compare them to other rolls and then compare them to the hex grid. This all sounds like a normal tabletop RPG but imagine if there was a little gap between every rule where you just gotta figure out what the designers meant. A move that would’ve taken five seconds on Super Nintendo takes about five hours to resolve here. But, between my spinning knuckle and Ken mysteriously rolling all 1s on his flaming dragon punch, he was soon defeated.
“I still don’t know a lot about Shadaloo,” Ken said. I was like, “That’s okay. I also fight because I’m a good guy.” Ken said, “That’s good to know. Now that I understand that part, I can recommend you talk to Vega in Spain. He’s got big claws and he works for M. Bison sometimes.” I asked if Vega was handsome. Ken said, “So handsome that he wears a mask during fights to stay pretty.” I was like, “Whoa!” And he was like, “I know, right?”
Fighting Vega was more of a challenge because I decided to make it so. Vega didn’t want to tell T. Robin Chadson where M. Bison was. But, through a Spanish translator, T. Robin told Vega he wanted to fight. So they fought. If I explained how the fight went, it would take a long time. Not because the fight was stunning but because I had to take out a pad of paper to keep track of which two of my three Triple Strike attacks I’ll keep. You should know this: Vega fell. His claws snapped off and everything, which was my idea alone. It was so cool. He was crying by the end and saying, “Not in the face!” But I didn’t get that translated until after I had hit him in the face.
And then I was in Thailand. After a confrontation with a bunch of goons that I just decided I beat because it was too much work, I finally faced M. Bison himself. The silver tuna himself. I told M. Bison that he ruined my life. M. Bison laughed and said, “That was the point of your commander betraying you. I knew you couldn’t resist coming here for revenge!” I gasped because I wasn’t expecting me to say that! I had fallen into a trap I’d set up.
Oh, M. Bison tried to cheat the match. He knew T. Robin Chadson had been coming. Bison rigged explosives on the field. He had snipers on every building surrounding the arena. For a reason that I decided not to explore, M. Bison would soon be happy to have T. Robin dead. But T. Robin Chadson had learned a lot in prison. He’d learned how to have eyes on the back of his head. With a quick snap of his wrist, he pointed to the snipers and said, “You better not!” And they didn’t! They took an early day and went home.
Bison growled in anger! “That makes me so angry at what you just did,” he said. I was throwing him off his game. The game of Street Fighter! Bison took the detonator out of his pocket. I gave myself a reaction roll to see if I could dive away in time. All 10s! Who’d have thought! I spun away and threw myself to the ground far from where the explosives went off. “Your tricks won’t work on me, Bison!” I said that part, not him. Although, really, I was saying all the parts to myself like when I pretend to re-litigate a break-up with an ex.
Summing up all the anger and rage and third thing I could, I produced a fireball. It may not have been a Hadouken but it was Hot and it was Dukin’ it out with Bison’s face. He burned. His face melted, revealing a skull until he fell to the ground, dead, a skull still attached to a full body. His red outfit became even redder. T. Robin Chadson hadn’t meant to go that far, but he was glad it was over. Now he could finally rest in his grave. Oh, also T. Robin Chadson is undead because I decided because that’s cool.
As a solo experience, Street Fighter: The Storytelling game is fascinating. It’s a lot like writing a novel but with more added extra steps and rules that almost kind of nearly make sense without ever going over. But I think I found something more important from the game: A friend. T. Robin Chadson. Who is undead and did go back to his grave, but can communicate from his grave and come back if bad guys also come back. I can do anything with the power of imagination. I could make him blow up the whole Earth and tell everyone it was all 10s. I’m basically God.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Nicholas Lovino.
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Punching Day: Fight Zone đźŚ
Imagine a sport with the lethal strikes of martial arts but the pageantry of pro wrestling and the choreography of a grade school ninja play. Imagine two biker babes in leather underpants. Imagine seven more nude biker babes. Maybe imagine three more. You fool, your insane and horny imagination has trapped you in…
The Fight Zone.
In 1995, Sugar Ray Leonard and the guy who would go on to produce the Purge movies got together with a bunch of stuntmen, martial artists, and the most affordable bikini model agency he could find to create Fight Zone. It was a series of pay-per-views that felt like a yellow belt’s insecure reaction to the Ultimate Fighting Championship. All that hugging and tackling wasn’t real fighting. Real fighting has no rules! It has nine variations of butterfly kicks! And costumed characters based around their nationality! It has fake blood and delicate choreography! It has announcers who are as confused as anyone about what this is supposed to be! Let’s meet them!
The lead commentator is Danny Martinez, who introduces his “sidekick, no martial arts pun intended,” Cameron Flener. Danny is Newscaster (Uncredited) in any ’70s TV movie and Cameron Flener is a Pauly Shore without the personality. This broadcast team doesn’t seem to know much about combat sports, sports, or broadcasting, but Danny lists their one qualification:
It’s not a lot of expertise, but as you’ll discover in the Fight Zone, competence only gets you dead. By this point, most of the audience will have clocked this as a second-rate and fake version of something, but it’s not clear what. This is a much worse version of pro wrestling and a much, much, much worse version of UFC, and the announcers seem to know it. They sense every viewer’s question will be “fucking why? Why do this!?” Well, Danny tries to answer that by listing possible motivations for Fight Zone warriors.
Most competitions don’t start with the announcer asking, “What’s the point?” The point of victory!? What kind of coward or Communist would even bring it up? Well, this may be another thing Fight Zone is insecure about because the same way it’s not really fighting, it’s not really a tournament. As Danny and Cameron badly explain, viewers can call in to vote for the champion, even if they lose or die. So this sport’s champion is decided not like a normal death match, but how 2007 American Idol viewers made fun of Sanjaya. And it takes Danny and Cameron so many tries to explain this very simple idea that I’m surprised “The Concept of Voting By Phone” didn’t win the belt. Let’s move on to the first fight.
The producers thought it would look cool if they replaced the ring announcer’s tuxedo jacket with a bulletproof vest. Like every decision every person made about Fight Zone, they were wrong. This guy looks less like a thunderdome emcee and more like a little boy got cold at a wedding reception and borrowed grandma’s fleece. He looks like a war reporter at a chess tournament brawl. He looks like a miracle that crawled from the laundry after semen soaked into a very special pair of cargo shorts.
The producers were trying for a Bloodsport thing, so the Finnish guy’s personality, backstory, and name is Viking. Viking scolds us, saying that since Vikings were the first Europeans to discover America, he has land rights to our country. I don’t need to tell you this is not how any single idea has ever worked in the history of land ownership or man, so I’m not sure what he means or what he could expect. It’d be like someone from New Orleans going into a Pizza Hut and declaring, “By rights of Louisiana Purchase, I am here to battle for my personal pan pizza.”
As Viking mocked our puny Christopher Columbus, our nation’s greatest pride, the cameraman created a sense of menace by slowly zooming in. Unfortunately, Viking’s speech went on longer than anyone anticipated and no one involved in this show had any sense of restraint. So people who bought this pay-per-view, disappointed taekwondo instructors in the single digits, got to see nothing but Viking’s nose for a full minute. He is facing off against The Irish Assassin.
The Irish Assassin’s thing is that he was trained in lethal street warfare by the Irish Republican Army, which is a great backstory. But instead of focusing on that, he attacks Viking for his weight problem.
This is a crazy line of attack because Viking was Tony Halme, who wrestled in the WWE under the name Ludvig Borga, and was very, very not fat. He looked like someone camouflaged a tank with a thin layer of bologna. And Irish Assassin calls this cartoonishly muscled hulk monster fat so many different ways the cameraman has long since zoomed past a reasonable closeup and up his nose. And he doesn’t know he’s being filmed like that, so his relatively sane finishing line also ends up sounding crazy:
We’re too close to see what Irish Assassin holds up when he says “THESE.” You’d assume hands, but he just called a man with 2% body fat obese for five minutes, so there’s an equal chance he pulled out his nuts or a handful of jelly beans or two bashful puppets. More importantly, shouldn’t one of these fighters be a good guy? We have a cocky foreign invader threatening to steal our land and a cocky foreign murderer who’s just a stupid dick. Fight Zone thought they had a genius idea to add storytelling to the UFC and accidentally recorded a half hour of grouchy nostrils calling each other names.
And with that, we cut back to our announcers and Cameron tries every catchphrase at once to create word soup.
I think they pre-recorded several generic versions of this to edit into the rest of the show, and Cameron misunderstood it to mean “several versions of this in the same take.” Whatever caused it, it’s a harbinger of nervous energy, like he knows this night will only get more awkward. Speaking of, hit the gong, white guy!
Now, lead the fighters to the ring, way, way too many biker babes!
I never thought I’d say this, but this might be too many lasers and ’90s thongs.
Each martial artist gets his own swarm of naughty Easy Rider babes. Against the backdrop of all the taiko drums and yin yangs, it feels like they glitched in from the wrong video game…
… and they don’t stop coming. However many biker babes you’re picturing, triple it. By weight and volume, 11% of this arena is leather panties. Sorry, I’m getting distracted. Let’s talk about the fight.
It fucking sucks. It’s a combination of bad pro wrestling and confusion. They fight like two 9-year-olds after their sensei told them to have fun but be careful. And the announcers don’t know what to say or what anything is called. During this exchange, Cameron says “The kind of pain I get to see here, Lord have mercy. Whoa, th– oh my goodness, that hurts.”
And to his credit, this move isn’t an anything. A generous viewer could call it an armbar, but it’s mostly two awkward guys disagreeing on how stupid stage combat should look. Cameron adds the childlike commentary, “I’m telling ya, the Viking, the Viking, and just… people say he doesn’t lose. He he he can’t lose. He’s a invincible fighter.” All at once the viewer is challenged to decide who this is for. If it’s for kids, why the tits? If it’s for UFC fans, why is it so fake? If it’s for karate nerds, why are they pro wrestling? If it’s for pro wrestling fans, why get announcers who see a textbook vertical suplex and say this?
Again, all the word bubbles are verbatim. Cameron followed up that body slam comment by screaming, “BACK ACHE 1-800-BACK-PAIN!” What a precious and wonderful disaster. And Viking follows up the suplex with a Jake “The Snake” Roberts DDT to which Danny declares, “Oh. Another. Oh, I am telling you. Those are… those are vicious body slams. I mean that hurts.” And maybe he’s right, because Irish Assassin stops moving. It seems to be over after two body slams, neither of which were body slams, making this “bare-fisted combat you crave” identical but outrageously worse than any ordinary pro wrestling match.
Cameron seizes on this lull in the action to do some color commentary. He says, “This is kind of interesting. We’ve got an Irishman and a Finland. … Finlander here.” If he was going anywhere with that thought, we’ll never know because a ref emerges from the mist to declare Viking the winner. There was no count or pinfall or anything. It’s a big ask for our suspension of disbelief, but I guess everyone in the Fight Zone just kind of understands when a fight is over. Danny gives his analysis on the match containing one suplex, one DDT, and nothing else:
They cut to a replay of the suplex, but instead of them commenting over it, they simply replay the clip in its entirety, with the original audio. So you get to hear his voice from one minute ago saying, “one hellacious body slam, oh. Oh, I mean. Bring out the d-domed pills, I’m uh, you know. I’ve got back pain,” like you’ve lost your goddamn mind. This show is broken in ways that seem impossible. It’s like someone tried to invent sports broadcasting and woke up in jail with their asshole stuck in a vacuum cleaner.
And it gets weirder. They cut to a ringside post fight analysis with Michael Jai White. You probably know him as a famous movie star and martial arts great. In 1995, he was already a veteran performer and a man with the confidence that comes from being a handsome, muscular fight master. And yet when they put a microphone in front of his mouth and ask him to describe Fight Zone, he turns into a nervous fucking wreck. Here is his analysis, word-for-word, in its entirety:
The next set of fighters, Manu and El Peligro, aren’t quite as menacing.
Manu is a gentle, tiny nerd whose pro wrestling character is a gentle, tiny nerd with father issues. He explains he’s good at fighting because his dad wouldn’t let him leave for school until 10 minutes before the starting bell. He seems to suddenly realize this isn’t much of a story, so he clarifies it was a mile away. He seems to suddenly realize this still isn’t much of a story, so he makes it a mile and a half, then two miles. All in the same sentence. So in his words, he is a master of karate because it was “a mile, mile and a half, to two miles to school.” My thirty eleven inch penis and I aren’t measurement experts, but the margin of error on a one mile distance should not be plus-or-minus one mile. And it gets worse. Young Manu had to do the same thing on the way back from school! His father was there at home, timing him!
So that’s why he’s the best. And it takes Manu seven full hours to finish making up this story. Which, by the way, he’s not even trying to sell. He’s talking to us like we’re his therapist, or a bad date he met on DumbfucksOnly. It’s hard to conceive of a less threatening origin than “my friends know me as a bit of a shark guy” followed by a long-walk-to-school story getting embellished as it’s being told. Manu, you’re competing in a laser arena filled with biker sluts where there are no rules. You can say you got to school every morning after your father opened up one of your arteries and threw you in the ocean. This is not a time for cute fibs.
At long last, after another month of describing his elementary school jogs, Manu remembers he’s on TV. He says “I know El Peligro is a dangerous street fighter, but I’m going to give him a taste of Hawaiian martial arts.” Great! A strong, punchy ending! Except it’s not. Manu goes on to list, in excruciating detail, all the dumb little karates he does that make up the portmanteau of his dojo’s style. It’s unreal. Manu has the thoughts of a pet psychic watching a cat overdose on painkillers.
El Peligro’s fighting style is quicker to explain: STREET. He’s got the costume and personality of what most viewers would call South Central Urkel. He, you know, mumbles something about gangs and homies. He probably could have rehearsed more, but it’s not like effort was going to save a concept this basic. El Peligro is a yada yada character and he knows it, so he wraps things up with a message to Manu in his signature low effort style:
Their fight is an adult blue belt demonstration. Taking turns standing deliberately still, the two men unload with spinning air swats and brutal nothing strikes. There’s no storytelling or impact, and it’s fake past the threshold of pointless. It looks like a lighting rehearsal for a play called Dojo Pussies. Sorry, that’s not really a joke. I think I’m still cranky from Manu’s origin story.
Danny, who has called every move so far a “body slam,” suddenly comes to life after Manu waves at El Peligro with his foot for the 17th time. He shouts “a round kick to the face and then a hooking needle kick!” So I guess we’ve finally found your area of expertise, dork. Jesus, I really am cranky from that Manu promo.
El Peligro is no match for the swift, misplaced feet of Manu and the underprivileged youth is kicked to death. At least in the fiction of this nonsense. In reality, the biker girls definitely took more damage from standing in front of the smoke machines than El Peligro took from standing in front of Manu’s kicks.
After his fake fight against a fake gangster, Manu smears some fake blood across his face and tells Michael Jai White how real everything was. World famous movie star, Michael Jai White, only has this to say:
Fight Zone is such a sloppy mess it has Michael Jai White stuttering like his wife caught him with his dick in it. Back to you, Danny and Cameron!
This was a bad time for Cameron to forget how to talk because the upcoming match is not an ordinary “dibla ah a another match l- tt.” It’s time for the BADD KARMA CHALLENGE!
Badd Karma is the main character of Fight Zone, and he was a bad choice. He has the voice, face, and attitude of a Theta Chi who thinks these sexual battery charges are bullshit, but he studies full wizard karate. He is undefeated in the Fight Zone, and says his energy-based style means any opponent who dares strike him opens themself up to… you know, I’d better have him explain it. This is what happens when he gets attacked:
He’s not done.
It’s fucking nu–
It’s fucking nuts. And it’s, in his exact words, what happens when you punch or kick him. In conclusion, no one can beat him because he doesn’t get emotionally involved in fights. Then he says several catty, unintelligible things about his opponent, Dreblo. But he is a fool. Our precious Dreblo is perfect.
Dreblo doesn’t seem to know everyone was doing characters. He talks like he’s at a job interview, reciting his record of three and a half years of Hapkido like it isn’t a punchline in this context. In combat sports terms, saying you have 3 and a half years of Hapkido is like a mathematician saying “I have 3 and a half years, or ‘pi’ years of fourth grade.” And it is only downhill from there. God bless our precious, precious Dreblo.
Dreblo gives this powerful testimony for incel-powered karate, then flubs at the camera, “You cank back out now, Badd Karma. Your ass is mine.” It’s adorable. And when the fight starts, he’s as fucked as you thought he’d be. Badd Karma is Fight Zone’s version of Steven Seagal, an untouchable wrist lock sorcerer, but he ends every throw with the theatrics of a boat show model. He’s like a figure skating routine based on Under Siege 2. And that would be the full description of the fight if he hadn’t gone way too far with his third flamboyant wrist lock:
He plants our poor lonely Dreblo on the back of his neck with all the care of a man who found a spider in his sex doll. He eats shit. They took his shattered spine and full balls to the hospital in a pillow case. And like they eventually do every time, these untrained nerds have demonstrated why it’s a bad idea to get together and play UFC.
Cameron forgets he’s supposed to be the pain-loving color commentator and reacts honestly: “Oh, that’s BAD.” Danny agrees, telling his broadcast partner, “That really hurts when that happens.” Yeah, Danny, snapping your spine into eight parts after 3 and a half years of hapkido instead of sex sucks, man. Great insight. Anyway, Dreblo responds by not moving, which is the losing condition of Fight Zone (sometimes).
Next up is Piranha vs. Scorpion almost as if to remind Dreblo’s pathetic remains they were allowed to come up with cool names.
Piranha’s promo is rough. His style is “OKINAWA” and he’s a weeb who didn’t know wardrobe was going to make him a biker. He was not ready for any of this. He rambles about the sensuality of flesh-eating fish, his travels through the Orient, and concludes by telling us the Japanese have a saying: “hajimemashite and sayonara.” And then he translates: “Nice to meet you, and goodbye.” It’s incredible. I will treasure it forever. Piranha could said anything here, memorized any line from any samurai movie, and he instead summed up his lifetime of Oriental adventures with the first two phrases in his Japanese For Tourists guidebook. It’s like bragging, “We have a saying in Texas, which locals know is commonly spelled with an x.”
His opponent, Scorpion, has been trying to get in a fight for seven years, but no one will meet his challenge. I know this because Cameron throws to his package by saying:
What does that mean? Scorpion helps make it more clear:
He’s a mystery. We only know three things about him, and all of them are those seven years without a challenge. He says “Americans are wimps” and “my style of karate is American Kenpo Karate.” Unlike the rest of the Fight Zone competitors, Scorpion can hear himself, so he clarifies “American Kenpo… but it’s a pity you guys didn’t learn it right.” It’s a beautiful save. But like Viking, his character is a confused colonial, so he ends his promo by threatening the viewer’s entire nation. “WE DIDN’T DISCOVER THIS COUNTRY! WE CONQUERED THIS COUNTRY! AND I’M GONNA CONQUER YOU!” It’s stupid, but fun stupid. And check this sweet shit:
That rules. That’s how you kenpo kick Shaquille O’Neil’s face, dick, and booking agent in one smooth combo. By this point, you already know what their fight looks like. They miss with dainty kicks while the announcers mutter “that hurts” or “that’s some pain.”
Scorpion eventually chokes Piranha out, a move the Japanese call “arigato,” but there aren’t any taps or referee stoppages in the Fight Zone. It’s up to each maniac’s discretion how long he strangles his unconscious opponent. Piranha is left in a heap, and I guess in this fiction, he’s dead? Maybe Michael Jai White can clear things up.
Not really.
Next up is the final match! It features Bruce Burly, representing the style of Australian ju-jitsu, which is “a form of, like, Australian ju jitsu.” He’s the best. He is a professional great white rescue hunter and he brought shark teeth like he’s our biology class guest speaker.
Speaking of bull whips, Bruce Burly is also a whip master!
Bruce Burly is so great. He has no idea what he’s supposed to be doing here in an all new direction. He completely forgets about the fight promo he’s doing and tells a story about the goddamn government repoing his boat. He pulls out a giant knife and complains it’s “bureaucrats like them that keeps guys like us from getting anywhere in life, right?”
And the question wasn’t rhetorical! You can hear a producer off camera respond, “y-yeah.”
It took us the entire show, but we have a good guy. And he comes with good news. He says the same “Abo elder,” Oota, had a vision of all the greatest warriors in the world coming together to battle, and if Bruce Burly went there and defeated them, he’d get his boat back from the bullshit Australian government, which would let him save the sharks! These are the stakes we were looking for! This night, in this Fight Zone, we are battling for Bruce Burly’s boat! And the sharks!
When Bruce Burly gets back to doing the fight promo, he has simply one word for his opponent, Ski:
Awesome. That’s how you make wrong numbers work, Manu. Anyway, Ski is a lanky stunt bro whose character is an adrenaline junkie. He’d be my least favorite even if he wasn’t standing in the way of Bruce Burly’s boat prophecy.
As dabs of fake blood make Ski’s face look less and less like James Franco, the broadcast team has lost all steam. Ski swings a kick near Bruce Burly and Danny says, “Oh my goodness that hurts when you get hit in the he– I hate it when that happens.”
Cameron adds, “Yeah, that’s terrible. It’s like gettin’ kicked by a mule, I guess.”
It’d be weird if Danny and Cameron were good, but it’s hard to conceive of someone being worse at describing fights than these two men. Which sucks because when the fists and feet are so far from making contact it’s hard to tell what’s supposed to be happening. Again, who is this for? What kind of person would cheer for this? I’m glad you asked, because the camera finally picks up a good shot of the crowd. Look at these people:
Even the crowd on Fight Zone is fake. They filled a room with actors dressed like background extras from Pit Fighter. This is the 1995 equivalent of Twitter bots arguing with themselves. They pretend to cheer while Bruce Burly pretends to kill Ski with a mom jeans choke.
When Bruce Burly has decided he’s won, he is declared the winner. We don’t get his thoughts on the win because Bruce Burly can’t understand Michael Jai White’s nervous muttering and leaves. In an evening of uniquely awkward moments, it is a strong contender for most awkward…
… and yet it’s barely worth mentioning compared to Danny and Cameron’s sign off.
All they had to do was thank people for watching and say goodbye, and the task destroyed them. Human Language had the most dominating victory of the night against Cameron Flener’s mouth. All that’s left to do is fill time while they wait for callers to vote for the Fight Zone champion, a useless honor for a pointless event…
… what the fuck, what’s this? We’re entering MASTER KAZJA’S DOJO!? To learn MASTER KAZJA’S FORBIDDEN FIGHTING SECRETS!? There has never been a more pleasant surprise. The guy who played Skeeter in Shootfighter: Fight to the Death is going to teach me a forbidden fighting secret!? I’m so goddamn ready.
Ha ha ha, oh no. Kazja is teaching the “secret” to adding power to your punch. It seems to be, you know, really meaning it. Like, putting your hand into someone, but more enthusiastically. I’m not being mean when I say Kazja’s “forbidden techniques” are included in the very first sentence said by anyone who has ever taught anyone how to punch. What a treasure. What a hilarious explosion at the end of this tumbling disaster of an event.
After a short, weird interview with kung fu star Cynthia Rothrock, we cut back to Danny and Cameron to announce the night’s champion. They already know the show climaxed with Master Kazja, so with no pageantry or excitement, they break the news that Badd Karma won. They don’t say what this means for Bruce Burly’s boat, and with it the fate of all the ocean’s sharks, but it can’t be good.
Badd Karma is given full karate honors: no prize money and slow motion footage of his fight from earlier. Which means we go out on two minutes of Dreblo writhing on the floor while our winner stands out of frame. Not a single moment of this insanity went the way anyone intended. I wish every sport, every thing was Fight Zone.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsors and Hot Dog Supremes: Zach and Eva, Fight Zone Tag Team Champions and winners of a Dairy Queen voucher good for 10% off any small Blizzard containing two or fewer mix-ins.
Our story today is about idiots, but it doesn’t start there. It started in prison, with our author getting his skull bashed open by a homemade morning star:
That is an excerpt from a webpage written by a mysterious, unnamed karate master advertising access to a secret move. It’s a move he invented as a teenager that made him King of Supermax, and it can be yours if you order now. Obviously, this is completely awesome, so I’ll let him continue:
You’ve maybe already spotted something about the author’s writing style– he never says something once and clearly when he could repeat it again and again across twenty sentence fragments. You’ve fully read the beginning, middle, and end of the story he’s telling, and he will tell it again hundreds of times. He goes on for 8808 words, and that’s real, I counted them…
If he ever sells a second fighting move…
He will technically have a novella…
A fucking sweet one.
Suspiciously similar to video games of the time, his enemies were muscled beyond human proportions and carried all manner of item pickups. But they were no match for our hero’s special… it was called the Blackout, a “controversial” move that does something no other attack does… amplify pain. The author somehow found a way to make attacks hurt. Let’s learn more.
This is going to sound crazy, but The Blackout sounds like a nose punch. Like, a punch to the nose. But that would be nuts. There’s no way. No way.
I mean, this is a nose punch, right? Sure, he added on some stuff about mercifully granting your enemy his pitiful life afterward, but this sounds like someone who got hit in the nose once and immediately knew he’d discovered life’s secret cheat code: it sucks to get hit in the nose. There’s no way this nerd has been in a real fi–
Holy shit. Okay, only a couple dozen people have eighteen UFC fights, so this is either a hilariously brazen lie or the author is a world-famous fighter I’m certainly familiar with. I’m rooting for the first, but both possibilities rule. We won’t find out for now, because he starts over on the story about him Double Dragoning through the supermax prison as a teenager, now with wildly different details:
There are now three thugs, and the ringleader has a shank equipped. Their only mistake was bringing their noses. Also, our hero’s “2 world championships” have somehow become “7 world fighting championships.” Which probably isn’t a mistake because he’s also smart now. “Great job on the prison tests,” said the warden! “You’re familiar with all the tests we give here in prison. Oh, your pain scores are also quite good. Hmm… a 9 in cooking as well; excellent stats all around,” added the warden character who never makes another appearance.
I’ve never wanted such a clearly fake story to be true more. The author beat every level of a fully armed prison and the United States Martial Arts Hall of Fame inducted him for it! This is the story Frank Dux would have made up if he had a Super Nintendo. You’re probably ready to order one The Blackout now, but maybe you don’t spend much time fighting prison gangs and you’re wondering if the move has any uses other than self-defense. Yes! Here’s a story of how you can use it around the kitchen:
Do you have a sex criminal fucking your pork rolls? Not anymore you don’t: BLACKOUT.
I love every detail of this, but not everyone is a child molester defending his food impregnating den. Some situations don’t call for shutting off someone’s brain with The Blackout, which I still think is just a nose punch. Luckily, the author tempers his invincible supermove with a philosophy of peace.
The Seven Nations held a meeting! To vote on whether the wasichu who killed a prison with nose punches should take charge of their sacred peace pipe!
And they voted YES.
It was an unusual honor. Fucking insane, almost.
And he still has it.
He didn’t even throw it away.
So he can find it pretty quick if there are any pipe smoking emergencies in the Native karate community.
Where was he.
Sorry…
The author got a little lost during his free association. He went from “I never go looking for a fight” to “In fact, I was entrusted with our nation’s most peaceful artifact” in five sentences. Incredible.
Anyway…
He gets back to his sales pitch.
After thousands of words, the author still hasn’t shared his real name. But as he’s explained several times, he earned the prison nickname “BAM” from all the nose punchings he did. However, keep reading and he’ll “reveal the very disturbing way he earned his prison nickname.” I don’t want to spoil anything, but he got it from the obvious reason he’s already said many different ways. When you run into concentrated madness like this, it’s hard to know what exactly happened. Did he accidentally copy and paste every draft of his fake life story into the same document? Is this the top 30 entries in a Final Fight Coloring Book Writing Contest? Maybe this is just what your memoirs look like when you get hit in the head with many padlocks.
Wait, so the Blackout is illegal in the UFC? That means I was wrong about it being a nose punch. In fact, the only face attacks that are illegal in the UFC are eye gouges and fish hooking. And I hope it’s an eye gouge, because otherwise this man wrote a detailed guide on putting your fingers in your cellmate’s mouth.
Biting is also illegal in the UFC. It could be a bite? A nose bite? Assuming the author is honest and correct, two things he definitely is not, nose bite is my current best guess for the Blackout.
Finally, the author includes a call to action in his sales pitch. After an avalanche of redundant words he put a button going, “CLICK HERE FOR A VIDEO OF THE FORBIDDEN NOSE BITE ALONG WITH MY PRISON SURVIVAL BO–” oh my god. Fuck. Did you see what he said!? Included with every order is the author’s full name. Amazing. Amazing in an unprecedented way. The fucking greatest bonus feature any karate move has ever included.
Well, the joke’s on you, Mr. X. Because sports keep pretty good records, and if you are 14 and 4 in the Ultimate Fighting Championship you are either Stipe Miocic or Ketlen Souza.
Except maybe you’re not since neither of those people bit their way through a prison. Or are 5’7″. I’m also told by the nighthawks they are not currently protecting the ancient peace pipe of the Seven Nations. Plus, and this might have been a mistake, you included the same identical graphic of your book six times except one of them has your real name:
So your name is Jermaine Andre, and no one is going to believe this, but you really were a 2012 inductee into the United States Martial Arts Hall of Fame!
He was lying about most of the other stuff, but not by a lot! He actually does have a 14-4 record in MMA, but only one of his fights was in the UFC in 2000 (he lost to Lance Gibson by knockout) and he didn’t have seven world titles. Also, I can find no record of any prisons found full of dead bodies with missing noses. Still, it is the most unbelievable twist that this maniac talking about a secret unbeatable move had a real fighting career. This means he’s absolutely unteachably stupid, or he thinks you are.
Maybe it’s the second! Because clicking the link for Jermaine’s free (definitely nose biting) video brought me to a page with no videos and an offer to buy his prison survival ebook, along with his Navy SEALs karate book, plus FBI kung fu for $37! A $97 value! You save $50.00! Wait, that doesn’t sound right!
But I guess it is!
Something about a grifter ex-con who can’t remember things or do math made me wary to give Jermaine my credit card, so we’ll never learn what The Blackout is, though we all know it’s 100% a nose bite. However, now that I decoded his real name from subtle clues and the time he showed us his real name, I could do the next best thing to learning a secret move that can kill anyone– I could buy one of this idiot’s books. And oh my god, you’re never going to see this coming:
Jermaine, martial artist and excellent prison intelligence test taker, wrote a book on dealing with idiots in 2012. Why the duct tape? Is Jermaine kidnapping the idiot? Murdering them? Kind of, but reverse it. According to the… I guess you’d call it a “joke” on the back, Jermaine, the author gagging a prisoner with duct tape, is the idiot. And if you don’t read his book, this is how you’ll die. It’s dark! Strange! Also, reverse it again!
On the copyright page, Jermaine repeats the photo and says it’s now a non-idiot dealing with an idiot. Okay, we are not off to a great start, but it could be worse. He could have started with “Webster’s Dictionary defines idio–”
Oh my god, this book is going to be so goddamn bad.
Wait, forget what I said. This is going to be incredible. Jermaine is going to use his martial arts ability to, if I’m understanding it correctly, counter strike idiocy itself. Basically, this is aikido for dumb. Or to put it another way, if someone is stupid, you reverse it so it’s you who is stu… oh no. I don’t think this is going to work. Let’s give him a chance, though! The Seven Nations didn’t give him that peace pipe for nothing. First idiot!
This is… not what I expected. This is barely anything. I’m supposed to ignore a Road Rager? I thought the 8-Time Supermax Champion of Knife Prison would have a cooler way to deal with an angry driver than “nothing.” How about intimidating them by holding up one of the human heads you pulled off a shiv-wielding pork roll fucker on your way to your car. Why not roll down your window and jump onto their hood? This is advice you’d give a second grader being bullied by a first grader. Disappointment is too small a word for what I’m feeling. This is like running into Steven Seagal at a buffet and instead of telling you the secret of redirecting any attack he says, “Forks are useful for food, they are the ones with three pokeys instead of a scoop; use a separate dish for pudding. Plus, I’m not Steven Seagal. I get that sometimes.”
Oh, are you trying to manipulate me? I’ll ignore you– reversal! We are only on the second idiot, and Jermaine has already repeated his plan of doing nothing and hoping the bad things go away. This is the precise opposite of “effective” and “dealing.” It’s also worth mentioning these people aren’t really “idiots.” He could have called Effectively Dealing with Idiots something like Summer Soups for Dentists or Pork Roll Sex Positions and it would have been no less misleading. Maybe Jermaine just needs a simpler kind of idiot, like a rude drive thru teller…
All you do is drive off and call his manager the next day? You goddamn Karen, I thought you were an 11-time World Inmate Kumite champion. What good is that if you have to take shit from a kid at Wendy’s? This is cowardly and petty garbage. This is a story a cop’s wife would make up if she dropped his chicken nuggets on the way home.
Jesus Christ…
Here at 1900HOTDOG, I’ve known adventures. I’ve seen a woman vamp for an entire sex book about not quite putting it in. I’ve watched a couple shatter their minds against the task of listing 1001 places to bone. I’ve seen a man in mad desperation try to fill 62 pages with semen dishes. But I have never seen anyone more helpless, more completely fucked than this martial artist who gave himself the task of inventing and then defeating 50 idiots. So far he has only ignored them or called their manager on them, ideas too basic to even engage with. We might as well put our idiot bashing nunchucks away, because we are reading the Passive Dumbfuck’s Guide For Remedial Breathing.
I’m shocked Jermaine’s idea for dealing with haters is to ignore them and hope they go insane and their life spins out of control for unrelated reasons, but what is that comment at the end? You “wouldn’t want them in your entourage anyway”? What does it mean? I understand he self-published this book while caught up in the media hype of being one of Missouri’s only 11 inductees into the 2012 Martial Arts Hall of Fame, but does he expect us to believe he leads an entourage facing off against rival entourages? This is the sad kind of delusional. I miss when Jermaine was defeating white supremacist gangs with illegal face karate. Maybe he’ll come up with something better for the next idiot, ordinary retail sales associates!
I like that Jermaine is getting more assertive. This fucking idiot came at him like he was going to sell something only to get hit with the perfect martial arts counter of “I’m only browsing. A-and also I have no money. Wait, sorry, come back please. Do you have this in a size passive-aggressive-bitch junior? Of course I can pay for it, I was lying earlier when I said I had no money. Dummy.” A perfect, effective way to handle this ordinarily impossible scenario. Thank God for this brilliant book.
So if someone is verbally abusing you, set a trap by wearing a cup! Then, the next time they humiliate you, punch yourself in the dick and tell a very long, very weird joke using wordplay about words no one has said. Of course, that’s only Phase One. Phase Two is waiting for everyone to get it… to understand what you’ve done. You’ll know Phase Two is over when you find yourself beginning Phase Three: explaining the joke. Like a winner. Like a martial arts winner! Keep in mind, this is the hypothetical best case scenario as imagined by the plot’s author. In a real world application, it might not go this well.
We’re a quarter through Effectively Dealing with Idiots, and all of Jermaine’s wisdom could be replaced with a coin that says IGNORE on one side and KAREN on the other. By the way, there is no text on the even-numbered pages of this book. Jermaine gave himself two pages for each idiot, but none of them needed more than one, so there’s a lot of blank space. It might not seem worth mentioning, but all of these things come together to create a truly unique monument to failure. “As a master of brutal, unstoppable martial arts, I leave unsanitary resteraunts, those idiots, and notify the proper authorities, half a page of blank space, one full page of blank space.” In a lot of ways it’s beautiful, like a swan too stupid to swim.
I think some of the book is trying to be funny, but it’s a problem. Jermaine’s idea of a gag is “haha kill your ex-girlfriend with a shotgun” and then he steps on his own joke by making sure you murder her with a legally registered shotgun with which you are properly trained and has been stowed in compliance with your county’s gun storage laws. Furthermore, and this is no laughing matter, follow the rules of engagement when gunfighting any former lover. The most important thing is fun. Now, let’s get out there and kill some idiots.
Do you have a home intruder? Get rid of that idiot in many subtle, easy steps! Start with the usual: act boring, offer no snacks… standard martial arts defense. The next part can be more complicated. Be a bad conversationalist and sometimes leave. Since idiots who don’t know when to leave are excellent at picking up non-verbal social cues, your passive aggression should work. If not, work your way up to asking them to leave by informing them “you don’t appreciate uninvited visits.” If that doesn’t work, you can try changing your name and abandoning your home. Martial arts!
As a master martial arts instructor, Jermaine advises anyone receiving unwanted sexual attention to shrink into themselves sheepishly and to reduce the number of dates you go on with your stalker to the lowest number possible. Whenever possible, huddle in this prison of fear forever. Maaaaaartial arts!
God damn it, Jermaine is asking to speak to the manager again. I’m going to skip ahead and see if I can find a crazy one. Hold on, wait wait wait what the fuck:
What? Someone is hitting on your girlfriend, so you ask him to taste your body on her lips!? And you’re claiming you’ve done this more than once!? Madness. I don’t even have a joke. What I do have is this, a perfect neural map of Jermaine’s mind:
It was clear almost instantly this was not a book about intimidating idiots with our nose bite or roasting them with our wits. It turned out to be a book about rolling into a ball and hoping a manager, God, or anyone would punish everyone around you. Yet as feeble as this book is, I’m not sure I could have imagined we would deal with a dirty joke by fleeing from it. I get we can’t make the dirty limerick guy choke on his own blood, but this is pathetic. Jermaine Andre writes like a liberal arts major in an Adam Corolla routine, and that’s it– that’s the worst thing you can say about someone.
This seems handy. If you think someone might be a thief, lay a childlike trap using all the guile of a man who was legally dead for seven minutes after he got hit in the head with a padlock!
This made me fucking gasp.
His idea to counter a loudmouth is to lie in wait for an opportunity to deliver a one man play about them? “Hark, countrymen! Lend me your ears to hear the tale of Loudmouthus, the truck! Guys, hold up, I’m doing a bit where Gary is a truck because he won’t shut up a-and I have a pedal bike, on the highway. I know that’s weird; this is sort of a premise heavy comeback. Let me finish! See, this is an allegory where our need for attention is vehicles but Gary’s is bigger than mine, because I am so normal. Hey! Be quiet! There’s a lot more! Martial arts!“
Push the button for the operator! That’ll show that dumb robot!
One of the things you notice in books like this is that as you get deeper into them, you can see the author losing perspective on who he’s writing it for, and what wisdom might be in general. This is no longer a book for people fumbling through normal situations. It’s so much less. Jermaine has been out of wisdom for 29 entries, and this is now a guide for horses making their first phone call. This is potentially the most dogshit stupid, useless tip about anything that could ever be possible. There does not exist a person for whom this is advice. Jermaine went from 8-time MMA Earth Champion to writing the first book for mashed potatoes.
I’m going to ignore the casual racism here because Jermaine makes a good point– all destitute foreigners deserve our contempt. But this, and I don’t need to tell anyone this, is the opposite of advice. Does Jermaine not know you get kicked to the back of the line when you hang up? When you disconnect, the call center doesn’t go, “Let’s rally, people! That passive aggressive dick is going to call back any second, and when he does I want him given top priority, and everyone speaking better English!” I don’t even know what you call this behavior. It’s rude and entitled, but not in a way anyone will know about. This is like the homeopathic essence of a Karen… a missing hiker demanding the name of her quicksand’s supervisor.
Okay, you have a bad boss? Here’s what you do: work really hard. Focus up and do a great job. Kiss his ass if you have to, and dedicate your life to making him and the company money. Next comes the easy part: keep doing this until you are laid off or dead. Martial! Aaaaaaaaaarts!!!
Are you in a bad relationship? Get out of there! DUMP THEM! Or you know, you could stay a bit longer. You might look like an idiot, but would that be so bad? Idiots run teams of highly motivated employees and are resteraunts. Maybe if you stopped laughing at their jokes and were more boring they would leave on their own. Maybe hang up and call back until you get a better person.
What are we, a fucking magical cat? We’re giving quests now? With exposure therapy traps designed for “idiots” to overcome their fears? How did this happen? It’s all nonsense, but I’m most troubled by the word “constantly.” Did you picture readers luring their friends past dangers with a cache of treasure more than once? “Hey! Who keeps putting all my fig newtons at the top of this towe– by gosh, my fear of heights is gone! This seems like the work of martial arts.”
Ha ha ha that should do it! Of all the infantile ideas this padlock-brained lunatic has thrown around, this could be my favorite. This is a man who has bitten the nose off multiple white supremacists, and his take on racial intolerance is the exact thing every 4-year-old says the moment they learn people have colors. “Um, technically, those are wrong. White? Try Pink. Yellow? Hello, more like Sunset Peach. What was my point? Oh my god, was that my whole point!?” Anyway, great job, Jermaine. Racism solved.
Alright, this is a food one, so we already know how he’s going to handle it. I think Jermaine might be out of surprises…
… is he somehow getting more passive aggressive? He got rid of his TV and turned his life into his roommate’s least favorite pie rather than confront him. I’d joke that his style of martial arts seems to be limply punching his own dick, but he already did exactly that. Come on, there has to be a real piece of advice somewhere in this book.
No, that’s ignoring again…
… and that’s asking to speak to the manager again.
What the shit? He told us to be the “kiss @ss” 13 entries ago, and now he’s giving us advice on how to deal with people like us? I think the stupidity is collapsing in on itself. I don’t know what to do! I’ve never seen this style of martial arts!
Jermaine writes like a 9-year-old refusing to accept the results of a spelling bee. This motherfucker is writing his dream comeback to a rude smoker, and he brings up his own farts twice. Once to be a pedantic twat and again to be a pedantic twat. There is no weirder way to put any of this. If Jermaine added, “Mayhaps I remove this sandwich from its bag and we use it to c-collect one of your farts, m’lady,” it would be no weirder. It might even improve. Which means I find myself organically saying that if Jermaine wrote 50 Ways to Ask Strangers to Fart in a Bag, it would be a better book.
What an unbelievable twist ending.
No one could have seen this coming.
Not even the grand practitioners of Black Dragon kung fu who are technically pinkish…
This whole time, the idiot…
… was Jermaine!
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mickey Lowman, master of the True Dragon Blackout Technique, which is leaving a two-star Yelp review under a pseudonym.