The Genre vs. the Real World

What kind of changes would have to happen in the real world to accomodate the kind of action that a game like Street Fighter, King of Fighters, or Fatal Fury seems to implicate? My goal here isn't to make broad, sweeping changes, but rather to minimize them as much as possible, yet still have a setting that makes some sense and has some consistency. Here's what I've got:

• The world has to be a much more cosmopolitan place than it is today. Southtown, the setting for the Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury games, and much of the King of Fighters games too, for that matter, is supposed to be a west coast American city. It's got street signs in Japanese in some instances, though. Plus, you've got characters with obviously caucasian features bearing Japanese names who are clearly supposed to be Japanese. Karin Kanzuki is one of the most overt examples, because not only is she clearly extremely white-skinned, but she has curly blond ringlets and blue eyes! She looks a bit like a teenaged martial arts loving Shirley Temple. I've seen explanations here and there about wigs, dye jobs, colored contact lenses, etc. That seems like special pleading. Let's just assume a more cosmopolitan world where what you look like and what culture you grow up in are not nearly so tightly linked as they are in the real world.

• Along those same lines, there are some people who don't look like they could belong to any ethnic group today. Who has naturally occuring blue or purple hair, for example? Or red eyes? What kind of young people routinely have white or silver hair? What the heck is Blanka supposed to be? If you don't think the default colors are crazy enough, check out some of the alternate colors. I don't mean ones that players have made with color edit modes, I mean stuff that just appears in the game itself.

I actually like this bizarre, almost alien diversity. In a cosmopolitan world where Japanese people can have blond hair and blue eyes, why not where some other Japanese girl can have lavender hair and be a J-pop singing sensation?

• The government sure doesn't seem to be very important. Why is nobody stepping in when fights break out between folks with crazy superpowers right there in public places, in front of national monuments and everything? Why doesn't anyone do anything about all the minors that compete in violent martial arts tournaments? How is it that these apparently penniless martial artists can travel around the world barefoot without any concern for things like national borders, passports, or anything like that? How does a city like Southtown conceptually come up with the idea of seceding from the United States? How does Bison establish what is essentially a rogue nation in the Golden Triangle? Well, all of that is a heck of a lot easier if you figure that governments play a much more limited role than they do in real life.

• Despite that, agents from Interpol, the Ikari Warriors (who are... what exactly? Mercenaries?) and who knows what other law enforcement agencies seem to have an awful lot of clout when they want to. They can travel internationally to arrest people. And by "arrest" them, I mean beat them up in a public place without so much as a warrant or court order or anything. I think the way to do this is to have national governments be extremely low key, laissez-faire, but they've ceded some of their authority to international law enforcement agencies. They're way too small and undermanned to do the job properly, so they go about as practically and expediently as possible, even if that means the occasional sacrifice of due process.