#turning both of the former off before the sam-parallel gets killed. <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[sammygender]

do you guys have any samcentric (or otherwise ig….) favourite spn episodes to rewatch

[redrobin-detective]

Ok, I’ve tried and tried and tried to write this fic because I see it so clearly in my mind but it’s just not going no matter what I do. But I don’t want the idea to die with me. The closest this came to being written was exile which was an attempt to bleed out some of the energy of this au.

Anyway, so it starts off vaguely similar to canon only more aggressive. There had been underlying tension between ghosts and humans for a while, the dead jealous/angry at the living for disrespecting them. The successful creation of the Fenton ghost portal (and another halfa) was considered an act of war and so the ghosts responded in kind. So basically all of S1 occurs fairly close to canon except ghost attacks are more violent and have increasingly more consequences as time passes. Also the attacks aren’t just in Amity Park with ghosts becoming a worldwide issue but Amity is a focal point. Regular people know the ghosts hate them though they don’t know why. Phantom is very much a controversial figure as he is a ghost but also clearly is fighting off the more violent ghosts. 

One day, not long after the events of Control Freaks, Amity Park wakes up to find three of their own are gone. Danny Fenton, Sam Manson and Tucker Foley are nowhere to be found. There’s a massive manhunt, the parents go on TV and beg for information but they cannot be found. Curiously enough, town hero Phantom was also missing. There’s some evidence they left of their own volition so the Mansons and Foleys eventually relent that the kids fled on their own. The Fentons are 100% certain the kids were stolen/killed by ghosts as a statement. And the fact that Phantom went missing around the same time means he was the one who killed them. Jazz knows Danny was Phantom but had no idea what was going on and knew her parents wouldn’t listen she just, kept quiet and privately tried to piece together what happened. 

Three years pass and finally it looks like the Ecto War is coming to a close. Young, naive ghosts attempted to raise Pariah Dark in a bid to win. It went disastrously but Phantom (who was periodically spotted around the world, deep in the worst battles of the war) and group of loyal allies subdued the king. By the law of ghosts, Phantom was named heir apparent and he declared that the fighting would stop. Humans and ghosts would have to negotiate and co-exist in peace. But he’s not king yet, no he needs to be crowned at the place where it began, Amity Park’s Fenton portal (”where it all began” has a double meaning of the beginning of the war but also symbolically where Phantom began as Kings assume the crown where their living life ended to show their abandonment of their first life and the commitment to their second). Amity is NOT happy to hear that their former hero is coming home.

Amity has been through the wringer, ghost attacks got pretty bad. The Fenton’s throw themselves into their work to cancel out the grief, they create a group of ghost hunters nicknamed the Reds (for their red blood, ghosts are nicknamed Greens) to control the threat. Valerie heads the young adult division and is considered one of the best, she drops out of school to devote herself to it full time. Oh also her dad is now the Mayor as most have died or didn’t want the job. There are still people who like Phantom and see him as a hero (a lot of Casper Kids) but it’s generally an unpopular opinion in town. Maddie and Jack are ready to obliterate the ghost that took their son’s life the moment he’s within city limits. It’s a powder keg ready to blow. It all comes to a head when Phantom and his entourage arrive.

First off, Phantom looks very different, much less human looking than when he left. He’s clearly aged like a normal teen but his eyes look much, much older.  His skin is dead white with a blue tinge to it from his ice core and his aura is super cold. His hair is longer and is very misty that kind of swirls around him and his has fangs and claws. When he’s deep in battle or his obsession, his sclera turn black and he looks scary af. His entourage is ghosts who have sworn loyalty to him, who he picked up along the way after battling beside them for 3 years. Fright Knight, Skulker and Frostbite are recognizable allies. They are not happy that their future King is back in Amity (secretly fearing they’ll lose him once more to his human life). J&M have a shot and are going for the kill when they see something that shocks them; Sam and Tucker are in Phantom’s entourage.

There had been whispers that Phantom interacted with humans, that humans were in his inner circle but this is something else together. And so are Sam and Tucker. Sam is Phantom’s General, she is talented and collected and half feral. She used to be a pacifist but the trials of war and understanding that peace sometimes needs to be fought for made her compromise. She’s covered in scars and an extremely talented fighter. She’s missing her right hand up to her forearm, she can form a ‘phantom limb’ (basically borrowing ectoplasm from her future ghost) to do some things with some powers. Tucker is the support, he uses human and ghost tech to organize, weaponize and generally keep things running. He’s covered in homemade tech (shields and weapons and computers) and he rarely removes. Both he and Sam have kinda forgotten how to interact with and really BE human after so long among the dead. They had attempted to conceal themselves but they had forgotten how strong parental love and recognition is. J&M want to know about Danny, the teens don’t know how to respond but assure them he’s alive. Phantom can’t bring himself to look at them.

This is where I start to lose track of things but there will be parallels of Valerie/Maddie vs Sam as female warriors on opposite sides who are willing to go behind, possibly compromising the things important to them, for victory. Tucker will be contrasted against Jack/Jazz as the one making weapons but also generally keeping the human parts of the team mentally/physically afloat. *Severe* PTSD for all three of them. They’re also unnaturally codependent on each other, get super anxious when one of the trio is out of sight and sleep in a big cuddle pile. They will fucking Kill You if you look at one of them wrong. Vlad will be involved, he had been jailed for war crimes but convinced Walker to stage a coup to overthrow Danny and take the crown before he’s actually declared King and is too powerful. Vlad is more unhinged here, more ghost than human (a hint on what could happen to Danny if he’s not careful). He is eventually defeated but he sacrifices his life for ghost power which, in the end, is what makes him able to be beaten.

 There’s lots of ideas on what it means to be live or dead and where the divide really is, is it a heartbeat or it is how you choose to use your existence. On how duty shouldn’t mean you need to give up everything. Because Jack and Maddie believe that Phantom killed their son and, in a way, they’re right. Before they left, the ghost war had gotten so bad and the rumors of Dark being resurrected were going around. Amity attacks were at an all time high, people in their school were being killed just because Danny went there. He realized he had to choose between Fenton or Phantom and he chose to protect the world. He abandoned his human identity and went off to fight in war. Tried to convince Sam and Tucker to stay but they followed him through hell and back. Because Danny spends so much time as Phantom, Fenton is severely neglected. His long hair is cool and floaty as Phantom but is unkempt and stringy, hanging in his face as Fenton. He’s wan and underweight and looks like a walking corpse. He knows his human half will give out soon if he doesn’t give it more attention but he just can’t there’s too much to do, too many people to save.

It would end with Danny being outed to the town, not the world, just the town. Jack and Maddie need to recon with the fact that their boy DID leave of his own choice but only because their failure to protect him (from both the portal and ghosts) made him feel he had to take all this responsibility on his shoulders. Danny also has to recognize that he (and Sam/Tuck) can’t do all this on their own and they can trust and rely on the people around him. Phantom is crowned King but he decides Amity will be his base. The trio eat more, sleep some, catches up on school all the while continuing their duties as King and court. The ghosts also see that Phantom’s humanity isn’t a weakness but a strength and will bring peace to the Earth/Zone so they also take some of the burdens off his shoulder. 

Basically I load up heavily with angst at the beginning and end with all the love and comfort imaginable. I just can’t fucking figure out the middle and my motivation will not let me write this shit out. But I can’t let this AU die bc it fucking keeps me up at night.

[gascon-en-exil]

Joining the Game Late: S3E10 “Mhysa”

Synopsis

All hell breaks loose at the Twins. Sansa’s still not allowed to curse. Tywin takes the credit for the Red Wedding in the middle of a Lannister family breakdown. Old Nan taught Bran how to tell stories for maximum foreshadowing effect. Walder Frey and Roose Bolton twirl their mustaches while Roose’s son dines on some prime sausage that’s totally not what you think. Yara is so moved by the sight of her brother’s penis that she sets off to be a hero. Sam and Bran compare notes on their plotlines before parting. Davos takes a shine to Gendry and rescues him, only to escape punishment because Melisandre’s fire found the main plot. Arya takes her first vengeance, and Jon has a bad breakup with Ygritte. Shae’s still with Tyrion, but probably not for long. Jaime and Jon have significant homecomings under not so great circumstances, and the show remembers Dany exists just in time for her to crowd surf through her big white savior moment.

Commentary

Like the two previous season finales this one comes off feeling pretty cluttered, except this time even more so. As far as climaxes go the Red Wedding is a comparatively more localized event than the succession crisis and Ned’s execution or the Battle of the Blackwater, and on top of that this season covers only around half a book so its ending lacks much of a natural finality. There is some to be had, like in the sweeping away of the Starks, the two paralleled homecomings by Jaime and Jon, or Bran heading north of the Wall, but this is noticeably more of a midpoint than an ending. Some characters are just left dangling for later seasons, like Theon and his sister (you have no idea how hard it was for me to avoid a BDSM joke with the former...and I get the impression I’m going to have to keep resisting that impulse going forward), or Arya who at the moment seems like she’s going to spend each successive season roaming the countryside and learning how to kill more effectively. I’m not even sure what to make of Stannis being the only ruler to rally to the Night’s Watch call for aid; it really has more to do with what the Lord of Light actually is and wants (thanks, lore and history extras) than anything connected to Stannis’s character. As much as I’ve enjoyed the push and pull between what he wants and what Melisandre wants him to do his personal agency has notably diminished this season and I’m not sure I like it.

All this I’m getting out of the way now, because I need to talk about Daenerys - for longer than she appears in this episode, but for her this is more like a summation of her whole storyline thus far. It’s certainly been...something. For two seasons now GoT has been sort of coasting with Dany, padding her thin plotlines with new material in some places and stretching them out across multiple episodes in others. She’s not the only character given this kind of treatment *coughs*Theon*coughs*, but since she’s so geographically removed from the other events in the show the audience is likely to treat her story as a more distinct element. That’s not a good thing, because at this point it isn’t doing a good job of standing on its own. Season 2′s Qarth storyline wasn’t so bad; it had some good character moments for Dany and Jorah and was punctuated by a strong resolution. Season 3 started Dany off on a big note with her conquest of Astapor and acquisition of the Unsullied, but after that it spent something like five episodes waffling around outside of Yunkai and splitting up its climactic action sequence and this hour’s resolution, in which a crowd of former Yunkish slaves exalt Dany in near-worship for freeing them offscreen somehow because three guys invaded their city and opened it up to an army. Racial optics aside this ending has too many missing pieces leading up to it to feel entirely earned; had the whole Yunkai story been collapsed into two or three episodes at most and there been a stronger connection between the setup and the payoff (maybe, I don’t know, bring out that slaver again so he can be made to grovel and surrender and/or get roasted to death?). Nope, her special ops force backdoors the city and I guess all the slavers are dead now with no other casualties because that’s how sieges work.

The events of Yunkai do however give me the opportunity to talk some more about Daenerys’s motivations and how to fit her present actions into her dictatorial, war crime-laden future. Last season I praised the scene between Dany and Jorah where she admits that she can’t trust anyone (including him) and is able to back up that mistrust with multiple concrete examples. Dany remembers how her brother used and her and how the Dothraki turned on her, and she knows well that she has no allies in Westeros because the people over there are too busy killing each other to care that her roundly hated father still has one living child. It’s therefore not surprising to me that she builds up her follower base by liberating slaves; not only are they numerous and untapped as a political resource in her current surroundings, but Dany believes she can trust in their loyalty because they owe their lives and their freedom entirely to her. The former slaves of Yunkai call her “Mhysa” (”Mother”), drawing an immediate connection to her maternal bond with her dragons who are also unconditionally loyal if not exactly free-willed in the same sense as a free man who has never known slavery. She’s got those in her retinue as well, but they’re loyal to her out of either love/lust (Jorah and Daario along with his mercenary army) or fealty to her late father and disdain for the two men who sat on the Iron Throne after him (Barristan). This interpretation of her methodology may be cynical, but it aligns well with how we know she reacts to people who do not act sufficiently grateful in response to what she perceives to be her kindness (ex. the witch from Season 1) and also foreshadows her descent into Mad Queen-dom once in Westeros. I think there’s also a bookend here with Margaery’s charity work in Flea Bottom in the first episode of the season. Both women - and it is perhaps notable that they are women - are performing good works in service to the unfortunate and the downtrodden, but they’re doing so in a publicly visible way that endears them to the masses and increases their political clout. Daenerys the Breaker of Chains is just a more extreme version of Margaery currying the favor of the people of King’s Landing, and it’s a reminder that in the darkly political world they inhabit honor and compassion are as much tools as anything else. 

[nerdylittleshit]

Thoughts about Spn 14x15

BEWARE! SPOILERS!

A bit late, but I’m not feeling that well at the moment and I couldn’t really find the mental energy to do an episode review before (not sure about now either, but here it goes).

Overall I liked the episode a lot. I loved the aesthetic of Charming Acres, loved the humour and that in Sam and Cas’s part of the story Cas was our POV-character (please more of that). Jack’s storyline continues to be interesting as well, and I am intrigued to see where the show will be going with this.

So, without further ado, here we go again.

“God has a beard”

Let’s start with Cas, as this part of the episode is told from his perspective. We get several reminders that Cas is different and doesn’t fit in in Charming Acres, because he isn’t human, but also because of his morals. Just as in the previous episode we are reminded that Cas is an angel. He doesn’t sleep and doesn’t eat, and for some time the milkshake Sam had serves as a Red Herring, making us believe this is what turned Sam into Justin Smith. But it is not because Cas doesn’t eat (which is a by-product of being an angel), it is his angelhood itself that prevents him from becoming one of the victims of the mayor. He very clearly uses his powers to threat Sunny and in the end even says directly “I’m not human”. I feel like all those reminders of what Cas is and what he is not (human) will culminate in him making a decision whether he wants to remain an angel or not. Last week he told Jack about the burden of his long life – that eventually he has to witness the death of everyone he cares about. Also his deal with the Empty is tied to his status his angel. While being an angel was an advantage on the last two hunts (Noah couldn’t see Cas, the psychic had no effect on him), Cas status as other is overall not something positive, because it separates him from his family and the people he cares about.

But there was another level in which Cas didn’t fit in: his lack of morals. This is implied by the landlady and the accusingly look she gave Cas. Cas is also linked to Sunny, the only other person in Charming Acres who is not affected by the mayor (because she is not entirely human as well). It is Cas who finds Sunny’s letters to Conrad, and just as Cas Sunny is lacking some morals, because her letters were rather passionate, implying she had premarital sex. In the movie “Pleasantville”, about a town very similar to Charming Acres, it is (premarital) sex that sets a lot of the characters free. However Cas’s lack of morals isn’t about premarital sex. Just as in the previous episode he is queer coded, starting with him mimicking a handjob while talking about Sunny’s letters, to him asking several people whether they have seen his partner, a rather ambiguous term.

But there is another parallel between Cas and Sunny: the promise they made to a dead mother. In Sunny’s case it was to her own mother, in Cas’s case to Kelly. Both promised to take care of a family member: Sunny of her father, Cas of his son, Jack. But Sunny has to break her promise after she realizes that her father has become a monster. Instead of killing him however she trapped him inside his own mind, where he is happy, but can no longer hurt anyone. This could be a foretelling to what will happen to Cas and Jack. Dean and Cas are both worried about Jack, who consumed a great part of his soul in order to defeat Michael, and if his lack of a soul will turn him into a monster as well. Does Cas has to break his promise as well? Will he find a non-violent way to stop Jack from hurting others?  

And then of course we have Sam, who is deeply affected by the loss of the AU hunters, as he had seen them as his responsibility. I wonder if people like Sam, people in an already low place, would have been more easily affected by the mayor than people who were already happy. But of course the happiness of Charming Acres is ultimately fake. Nobody can be genuinely happy if you take away their free will and their agency. Sam/Justin’s happiness is based on the absence of pain because he can no longer remember his former life, but pain is part of living as well, and genuine happiness comes with the acceptance of pain.

The fight scene between Sam and Cas was of course a huge parallel to the fight scene between Dean and Cas in 10x22 (and Cas now keeps wondering why those things keep happening to him). However compared to 10x22 felt almost anticlimactic and less tensioned. Also, what I found interesting is that Cas did manage to talk Sam out of his trance, however in 10x22 Dean was still heavily under the influence of the MoC, and yet he didn’t kill Cas.

Back in the bunker Sam says that the place no longer feels like a home, because of all the tragedy happening inside of it, constant reminders of the people they lost. He says he needs some space, but it made me wonder if maybe, especially as the show might come to an end in the near future, the Winchesters will get a new home, one that isn’t tied to their jobs, where they can make new happy memories.

“'WWWD' -- 'What Would the Winchesters Do?’”

Parallel to Sam and Cas, Dean and Jack’s storyline also centered around morality or the lack of it. The big question was about Jack’s soul: how much was left of it and how it would affect it. So Dean decides to take him to the only other currently soulless person he knows: Donatello.

I think Dean’s little test with the Angel Food Cake and the Devil’s Food Cake was there to add some humour, but had within the episode itself no deeper meaning. Outside the episode however it validated the significance of food as a metaphor, or as Rowena would say: everything means something.

And then there is also Dean’s invented new saying: It is not the snake that is dangerous but their bite. Meaning you should not judge someone on what they are but rather on their actions. Then again others would argue that it is in the snake’s nature to bite, and while we can’t blame the snake, it is inevitable that it will happen. Concerning Jack we go back to old question that has been asked since he was born: nurture or nature, which will affect him more? Is it inevitable that Jack will become a monster, because of his powers and the lack of his soul? Should we judge him on his actions? Back when Jack was born Dean only judged him based on his nature. He is a Nephilim, therefore he must be bad. Since then though things have changed.

Donatello gives Jack the advice to basically fake it, basing his decisions on what the Winchesters would do, using them as his moral guide. Which is a terrible advice because the Winchesters not always make the best choices. But the fact that Jack can no longer decide on his own what is right and what is wrong is worrying. I took the fact that he cared about the wellbeing of Felix the snake as a good sign, but in the end Jack decided that killing the snake would be the best for it, demonstrating his powers, and playing God in deciding who lives and who not. Thinking that its death would be the best for the snake and also believing that is what the Winchesters would have done shows how alarmingly off Jack is.

Until next week <3

[aion-rsa]

15 Most Powerful Street Fighter Characters

https://ift.tt/3lTNhAL

Street Fighter has been around since 1987, which means it has introduced many, many characters to the fighting game pantheon. Despite being a game where every fighter is supposed to be more or less on the same level, the narrative doesn’t reflect that. Boss characters and main heroes are the best of the best in the story. Some even reach demigod status and become virtually invincible . For real, even Sean’s endings show him either lose repeatedly to Ryu or reveal that him winning the game’s tournament was just a dream he experienced while knocked after the first round.

So who are the most powerful characters in Street Fighter lore? I’ve put together a list of the top 15. Funny enough, Guile and Chun-Li – the heroes from the two live-action movies – are nowhere to be found. Go figure.

15. Seth

Seth has the honor of being the final boss of the Street Fighter IV games. Not only does Seth have Taskmaster powers that allow them to understand basically every fighting move they see but they have a rubbery android body that allows them to upgrade said moves in badass ways. Seth runs their own evil organization and is the mastermind behind the big tournament, which gives them a spot by default.

Unfortunately, Seth never really does anything of note in the story. They gave Ryu a run for his money in the Tie That Binds anime, but Seth never really proves to be anything more that just another villain. They’re quickly overshadowed by Bison licking his wounds from Street Fighter II and reestablishing himself as the top terrorist. Seth is reduced to a malfunctioning afterthought.

14. Cody Travers

Cody is a unique subject as he’s a hero from another property (Final Fight) thrown into Street Fighter, where he isn’t really allowed to be the protagonist. It’s a lot like how Terry Bogard and Ryo Sakazaki are heroes in their own fighting games but act as supporting characters in King of Fighters. With Cody, there’s an actual story explanation.

Simply put, Cody is insanely powerful but lacks the drive to hit his potential. In both his regular and Oni form, Akuma tells Cody in his winq uotes that if he actually tried, he would be a major threat. That’s as high praise as you can get, considering how Akuma usually resorts to insults. Cody never does act on his potential, so we don’t actually know how high up the ladder he’d be if he gave a damn and asserted himself. In the meantime, he lazily puts up his dukes in hopes that it will kill his boredom.

13. G

As the story goes, Street Fighter V was supposed to get a second campaign, and G was going to be the villain, but the idea was scrapped. Despite all that, this enigmatic Uncle Sam knockoff is still a mystery threat that we’ve yet to understand. In fact, according to Rose’s Street Fighter V storyline, G is supposed to be the harbinger for the end of everything.

While he appears to be the avatar of Earth itself, G ranks only so high. While Rose can’t stop the apocalypse, she can still best G in battle. Gill also makes his first public appearance by defeating G, which G seems to fully accept with open arms.

12. Rose

Rose doesn’t get her hands dirty too often, but her backstory makes it easy to calculate where she ranks among Street Fighter‘s strongest. She is Bison’s doppelganger, albeit flipped in gender and alignment. In fact, Rose is basically equal to Bison, but just when he’s in his base form. When he’s amped up his Psycho Power, there’s nothing Rose can really do to match up with him. You’d think that by now we’d see some kind of purified form of Rose where her Soul Power is off the charts, but maybe in Street Fighter VI.

11. Gill

Gill carries himself like he’s the biggest threat in Street Fighter’s world. He’s the one who controls fire and ice. He has the power to self-resurrect. He runs his own secret organization, and seems like a bigger deal than Bison because he follows him on the timeline. In-game, he’s an absolute nightmare to fight. Gill seems like he should be at the very top of the rankings.

But honestly? He actually kind of sucks. He seems to lose a lot. In canon, he loses to Alex. Capcom Fighting Evolution depicts a showdown against M. Bison where Bison reigns supreme. In the very beginning of the manga Street Fighter III: Ryu Final (Masahiko Nakahira’s works are as official as you can get without being outright canon), Gill takes a beating from Ken. Even the nature of Street Fighter III: Second Impact and its secret boss fight suggests that Akuma has a leg up on him. Gill may be able to get up from these losses, but he still gets knocked down in the first place.

10. Alex

Because of Capcom’s tendency to downplay Street Fighter III, we never get to see Alex do all that much. That’s a shame, since Alex is cool as hell and really should pop up more. He’s still defined as the hero character of the Street Fighter III games who canonically thrashes Gill, and even gets a moment in Street Fighter V’s cinematic story mode where Dhalsim tells him that he’s going to be a huge deal down the line.

But despite his role in Street Fighter’s final chronological chapter, Alex isn’t the best of the best. His ending shows that he still eats Ryu’s dust and he has a long way to go. Now that he’s gone past his need for revenge against Gill, all Alex wants is to get better at fighting so he can eventually get one over on Ryu. And if he doesn’t? He’s still having the time of his life.

9. Ken Masters

Ken may never be as important as Ryu, but the games always insist that they are rivals. No matter how much more skilled Ryu gets, Ken is still there to give him a good one-on-one. On paper, Ken should be left in the dust due to how much more driven Ryu is while Ken balances his fighting with his family and business responsibilities. But it’s actually his family that gives him an extra edge and pushes him forward. Kind of like when Spider-Man is buried under rubble and thinks of Aunt May to brute force himself out of danger.

Like Ryu, Ken has his own special, sinister form as Violent Ken. Unfortunately, that form is pretty ill-defined in and just comes off as “Ken as mind-controlled asshole.” He’s still someone Ryu can take down, just in a more reluctant way.

8. Sagat

Sagat’s defined by his losses. Ryu tore his chest apart in the first Street Fighter. Dedicating himself to rage only caused him to lose to his former pupil Adon. He eventually lost to series joke Dan Hibiki. But those losses come with an asterisk. Ryu’s win came thanks to a supernatural cheap shot. A clear-headed Sagat got his win back from Adon down the line. Sagat basically let Dan win so Dan could let go of his thirst for vengeance and learn the same lesson as Sagat.

Sagat and Ken exist as Ryu’s go-to rivals, but I’d give Sagat the edge. While Ken has always been parallel to Ryu, Sagat started with a huge lead in skill and power. It’s only over time that Ryu has been able to catch up to him, and even then Sagat’s usually depicted as such a beast that Ryu is the underdog. Well, baseline Ryu, at least.

7. Ryu

Being the protagonist doesn’t automatically make you the strongest. Ryu may be able to take down most opponents, but he’s not obsessed with being at the top of the ladder. He even has the humility to know that he doesn’t truly live up to his reputation. And itoesn’t hurt that his iconic, name-making win was achieved only after he briefly became possessed by his inner darkness and cheaply blindsided Sagat.

As shown in various Street Fighter III endings, Ryu still has a long road ahead of him. He’s great, but he’s still not a master. That may take a few more decades. In the meantime, his Satsui No Hado form is like a cheat code that lets him skip years of training and puts him over his more friendly rivals.

6. Gen

Gen is like Ryu or Akuma in reverse. He’s incredibly deadly and nigh unbeatable, but he’s long past his prime. He’s dying of leukemia, and it’s his own stubbornness that’s keeping him alive, even when regularly challenging Akuma and somehow surviving the encounters. He and Akuma are treated as ships passing in the night, where Akuma feels somewhat cheated by how he’s stuck with a weaker version of Gen while his own power only grows with time.

Read more

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In the Street Fighter games alone, Gen would probably rank a bit lower, but I’m going with the potential of the man he used to be. The UDON Comics one-shot Akuma vs. Hell even shows Gen at his strongest in the form of an apparition from the after-life. When he doesn’t have sickness holding him back, he does prove to be a bit more than Akuma can handle…for a time.

5. Gouken

Much like Rose with Bison and Ken with Ryu, Gouken is on par with Akuma when it comes to the latter’s base form. The initial story was that Gouken beat Akuma back in the day, but didn’t kill him. That just isn’t his style.

Then Akuma got stronger, beat Gouken, and murdered him with his Raging Demon attack. But by the time Street Fighter IV came around, they retconned all, revealing that Gouken was able to figure out a counter just in time, which resulted in him falling into a two-year coma instead of dying.

As the yin to Akuma’s yang, Gouken is there to oppose him and help Ryu overcome his inner-demon issues. Unlike Akuma, Gouken doesn’t really have any ultimate forms. Ryu and Ken’s master seems to have leveled off while Akuma is still shattering his limits.

4. M. Bison

It really shows how screwy Street Fighter’s lore is when the iconic M. Bison of Street Fighter II is considered Bison at his weakest. It turns out that Bison’s strongest form came before that, in Street Fighter Alpha 3. At least that explains why the guy is skinny in one game and built like a goddamn bus in the other.

Bison is a man who figured out how to weaponize his own evil, and not only expelled all the good from his soul to make himself stronger but he’s able to figure out crazy sci-fi ways to increase his power on top of that. He loves stuff with satellite lasers, or simply crashing satellites onto major cities because people freaking out and dying is like steroids to him. His downfall usually comes from trying to oppose or take over Ryu, whose purity and inner strength is enough to be Psycho Power’s kryptonite.

But that’s not Bison’s only weakness…

3. Akuma

Yes, Akuma, by definition, eats Bison’s lunch on a regular basis. He made his video game debut by just popping in and destroying Bison with one move in Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Hell, that’s canon! Despite his rivalries with Ryu, Gen, and Gouken, Akuma is 100% all about being the guy who ruins Bison’s (and sometimes Gill’s) day on a whim.

Too bad Capcom’s somewhat nerfed his accomplishments over the years. Akuma was considered the man who killed Gouken, Gen, M. Bison, and possibly Adon. Since then, all those deaths have been negated, and the Raging Demon isn’t the move above all others that it used to be. Still, Akuma gets to constantly up his game with his Shin Akuma and even Oni forms, which could probably destroy Earth itself if he felt like it.

2. Oro

In terms of traditional Street Fighter characters, the strongest is not a boss or even a villain, but a kindly old man in his hundreds dressed in rags. Introduced in Street Fighter III, the hermit Oro stands above everyone and is only conceivably beatable because he chooses to fight one-handed. Battles are just too easy when he uses both arms free, so holding back allows him to better check out who has potential to one day be on his level.

It’s hard to say who is superior between Oro and Akuma, or should I say, Two-Arm Oro vs. Oni (the UDON comic did have Two-Arm Oro completely clown Akuma but fail to kill him, for what it’s worth). In the end, I have to give it to Oro. Akuma comes off as a major threat that Ryu will gradually, but soon overcome. By the time Ryu has a shot at besting Oro, he’ll probably be sporting gray hair. He is the final finish line in Ryu’s search for enlightenment.

1. Ingrid

Ah, Ingrid. The most powerful Street Fighter character is also one of the most obscure. Ingrid was meant to be introduced in a 3D fighter called Capcom Fighting All-Stars, which was cancelled and replaced with the lazy-as-hell Capcom Fighting Evolution thatfeatured a roster of reused assets from older games as well as Ingrid in 2D sprite form. To get more bang for its buck, Capcom threw her into Street Fighter Alpha 3 MAX.

Ingrid is a cosmic entity that dwarfs the power of M. Bison. It’s more apparent in Street Fighter X Tekken, where the plot revolves around various duos racing towards a MacGuffin called Pandora. In the comic that comes with the special edition of the game, it’s revealed Ingrid herself created Pandora for…reasons. And considering the reality-breaking (albeit ill-explained) abilities Pandora has, Ingrid’s just on a different level to the classic Street Fighter cast.

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