Essay No. 3: On Continuity and Canon

(What happened to Essay No. 2 you may ask?  Nothing.  It was just kind of obsolete, so rather than port it from my old website, I just dropped it.  I might add it back in with new formatting... maybe.  But probably not.)

Because I think these types of games, their characters and their settings represent a foreign (namely, Japanese) interpretation of the modern superhero story line, I often make comparisons to superhero comic books. If you think of Ryu, Terry or Kyo as analogs to the X-men, or Spiderman, then they kinda work, and if you think of Rugal or Bison as Magneto or Dr. Doom, you can see striking and obvious parallels. If you think of the plot to take over the world by NESTS from King of Fighters '99 through King of Fighters 2001 by holding a martial arts tournament, gathering data from how the champions fight, and channeling that data into a clone army, you can easily see what I'm talking about in terms of "comic book" plots too. Heck, Heidern serves for the King of Fighters games (and Chun Li and Charlie/Guile's bosses for the Street Fighter games) almost like S.H.I.E.L.D.

However, I specifically want to talk about one issue and discuss it a little bit in relation to my story, and that is continuity and canon. Comic book fans the world over were excited when Sam Raimi filmed the first Spiderman movie with Toby MacGuire and Co., yet nobody expected it to be a faithful reproduction of the origin of Spiderman as originally written by Stan Lee in the early 1960s. For one thing, the media was completely different. For another, the audience was considerably more sophisticated. And for another, there've been too many changes in the world over the last forty years for that to still be even a little bit credible.

So what did Raimi do? He retold the story. The spider that bit Peter Parker wasn't radioactive, it was the result of genetic manipulation by Norm Osborn. Parker's look and powers changes slightly; Osborn changed even more significantly (the Halloweenish original Green Goblin wouldn't look anything other than extremely cheesy in a big budget action movie meant for a general audience, after all) and many of the details of the origin of Spiderman story, as well as the relationship between Spiderman and the Green Goblin were changed fairly significantly.

This of course, wasn't the first time this happened. Marvel Comics a few years back kicked off an extremely popular line of comics called the Ultimate comics where popular characters and series were "rebooted" and restarted, the stories retold and the character redesigned, with a more modern and sophisticated audience in mind, and without all the baggage of forty years of accumulated back story. There are some very significant differences between "regular" Spiderman and "ultimate" Spiderman, which in turn are quite different from "movie" Spiderman. If you keep in mind that there are at least five animated series of Spiderman, each also with their own separate "canon" of continuity and details of how the stories were told and the characters developed, you can see that some major changes were made to accommodate different media and different audiences.

What does that have to do with me and this story? Well, frankly, I'm doing the same thing. I'm referencing the "original" canon when it works for me, I'm even giving a nod here and there to the UDON comic books, because they had some great ideas, but I'm retelling these stories my way to make it work for me. I have a few more significant challenges than most others who've tried to write fan fictions about these games; I'm combining incompatible plot lines from several different games with well over a hundred potential characters, and setting a goal of meeting as many of those characters as reasonably possible without it feeling forced or fake. This means, of course, that I'm going to have to make a fair number of changes to plot points as well as character description and development.

One way in which this will happen is in the arena of romantic entanglements. Maybe I'm just a bit of a softie, but a good romantic relationship makes any story better. Sadly, most of the interesting prospects from SNK at least are already tied up with other characters. This is problematic; for many reasons, cross-source material pairings are more interesting than in-game pairings. I've also decided to make some rather major consolidations and changes to, again, further facilitate the mingling of various story lines. With three story lines from King of Fighters to contend with, one from Fatal Fury, a few from Street Fighter and even some nods towards Darkstalkers, anything else would be a confused mess. If you don't like to see established video game canon changed like this, I can only suggest that you avoid this story, then, and read the paragraphs above; my changes aren't any more significant than having Spiderman date Shadowcat from the X-men, for example. To make the story tell-able, I had to make changes, and I'm creating this note specifically to justify them to the fans.

On a slightly less serious note, exactly what stories am I retelling, and which stories are being relegated to the background? That's a good question.

I'm going to assume for the time being that the plots of the original Street Fighter and Fatal Fury video games happened more or less exactly as described, in the "distant" (i.e., at least a year or two ago) past, while the events of the Street Fighter Alpha series and the original Rugal headed King of Fighters games ('94 and '95) happened in the very recent past (i.e., just a month or two tops before the stories start.) Geese Howard is missing and presumed dead (cf. the Fatal Fury ending), as is M. Bison after the explosion of his Shadowloo headquarters in Thailand (cf. Cammy, Chun Li, Charlie, Ken, Sagat, Ryu and Sakura's endings from Street Fighter Alpha 3) and even Rugal is presumed dead after the crash of the Black Noah (cf. Kyo's team ending for King of Fighters '95.)

The story lines that I intend to weave together, with a fair amount of changes to fit them all together, are:

1. The later Fatal Fury games (although these stories tend to repeat themselves over and over again; Geese falls from his tower no less than three times before finally being declared "officially" dead, so the Fatal Fury story lines are an amalgam of Fatal Fury 2, Fatal Fury 3 and Real Bout Fatal Fury. The other two Real Bout titles are "dream matches."
2. The "NESTS" story line from mid-era King of Fighters games.
3. The "Sacred Treasures" story line from current King of Fighters games (although granted; since the resolution isn't yet out, this story line is a bit confused at the moment. When King of Fighters XII is released, hopefully it will make more sense. Of course, by then, it'll no doubt invalidate what I've written. NOTE: Since this is an Orochi based story line, I'm dropping the original Orochi story line and telling this one instead. It could feature characters from the Original Orochi story line re-imagined here (i.e., Leopold Goenitz and possibly others. But not the New Faces team; I think those guys are incredibly cheesy.)
4. The Street Fighter 2 story line.
5. Possibly a few ideas from the Street Fighter III, Final Fight or Darkstalkers story lines as well.

As you can hopefully see, this is a bewildering tangle to try and unwind and remake into anything that's coherent or interesting, so a little patience and forbearance if you see changes that are obviously "wrong" from the canon is requested here.