Author: dannyhong

Ken Masters, Street Fighter canon and divorce in fiction

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A while back, I remember making a post about how Ken Masters in Street Fighter V was clearly on the back half of his prime, and was at the stage in his life where he was wearing compression shirts to help hide his deteriorating physique, a natural occurrence with the passage of time.  And as much of a Ken main that I’ve been in my own experience playing Street Fighter games throughout my life, it was an awkward but still mostly a yeah ok whatever thing, because it was still a fictional character in a video game.  But it didn’t change the perception for me that Ken was being slightly disrespected in the grand spectrum of the franchise’s history.

Many years later, no real thought given, but with the impending release of Street Fighter 6 (and it’s shitty logo), some gameplay footage has apparently been leaked, and among it, some visuals of what Ken Masters is up to in SF6.  Long story short, the once famous and handsome and suave and cool US champion of some title of fighting, in SF6, has become a shell of his former self.  His wife has left him and taken their child, and supposedly the story of Ken is that he’s on the pursuit of trying to be just like Ryu, which is the best fighter on the planet.

But apparently he also has decided to be a homeless man just like Ryu, and has apparently hit bottom in terms of appearance and attire, which is kind of hilarious because now he’s basically turned into the Mark of the Garou rendition of Terry Bogard, which may or may not be a deliberate dig at SNK, that hobo Ken Masters is basically the greatest SNK fighting game protagonist of the 90’s.

And that’s about as far as we’re going to go with analyzing the storyline because when the day is over I really don’t give two more shits as much as this is just something that piqued my interest and inspired some words to manifest onto a post.  But my reactions to this character development are:

  • Ken Masters has decided to become a homeless bum just like Ryu; in the name of trying to be the best fighter in the world, but still homeless all the same.
  • Eliza, his ex-wife, is apparently the sister to Guile which is completely new information to me, and makes me wonder just when the hell this was written into the series canon, because the two characters have had basically no unique interaction throughout the first ten years of the series since Guile debuted in SF2.
  • Street Fighter canon writing has apparently gotten really dark, and not in the sense that people are dying and bad guys are succeeding at taking over the world, but its characters are being dealt some too real and life-fucking circumstances like divorce and separation from children

Obviously, I’ve been living in a bubble under a rock over the last few years, so series canon has passed me like a bullet train, but I get the impression that SF lore is kind of starting to get as wild and written on the fly as Mortal Kombat lore is.  Maybe not so outlandish to where they’re retconning all sorts of joke characters as core characters or merging franchises in order to boost their character counts, but when you’re going as far as to deliberately deconstruct characters like having Ken go through a divorce and becoming a hobo, that’s some pretty wild development.

Then my train of thought departed from solely Street Fighter, but just on the thought of why it seems like divorces and other breakups seem to keep happening to fictional properties.  I chatted it out with a group chat of confidants and realized that I was answering my own question, but it doesn’t make it any less sad to those of us in a generation or minded like one as mine is, to see these fictional breakups.

Peter Parker and Mary Jane.  Homer and Marge Simpson.  Kermit and Miss Piggy.  Ken and Eliza Masters.  All these fictional couples had loving, lasting, strong relationships, but as time has progressed, the world becoming more cynical, people needing reassurance that they can be related to and aren’t alone, even these are not safe from being dismantled in order to, try and be an ally.

Because that’s really what it seems to be all about, showing the watching world, that anyone and everyone is capable of break-ups and divorces, and for those children of parents who go through it, that they are not alone.

I understand that it is important to be allies, but damn it, I’m seeing iconic relationships of my childhood being systematically dismantled in order to hitch their carts to helping, and it’s no less sad, even if there are important lessons to be taught and imparted by doing such.  It’s exasperating and depressing all the same.

Fiction is where people come to escape how shitty the real world actually is, but apparently even fiction is not safe from the heavy hands of reality, to where it has to be altered and mutated into content that can help people who just wanted to get away from it in the first place.

Pretty sure the Hardy Boyz are the only thing keeping JNCO jeans alive

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Of the little bits of wrestling that I actually catch here and there, usually through what social media spoon feeds me, I know that the Hardy Boyz are back together, in AEW of course, where seemingly all older WWE talent seems to go to finish out.  Naturally they can’t use the Hardy Boyz name, but the point and brand is still fine, when they’re referred to as just The Hardys.

I admit that back in 1999, I was a fan of the Hardy Boyz, when they were repackaged and paired up with Gangrel.  I remember thinking, aren’t these those two jobbers who wore plaid?  But then Jeff Hardy is doing these picture perfect swanton bombs, and next thing they’re upsetting the Acolytes and they’re tag team champions, and I was kind of sold.

But that was 1999, and a few years after that, after the memorable and outstanding classics that they did with all the ladder and TLC matches.  Throughout the passage of time, they were broken up, reunited, repeat, numerous times, Matt left, Jeff left, Matt came back to feud with Edge over the Lita cheating scandal, Jeff showed up in TNA, Matt went to ROH, Matt went to TNA, both went to ROH, both came back to WWE, split up, Matt went to AEW, Jeff was relegated to 24/7 segments, left and then went to AEW and here we are.

I could also mention the 20+ times Jeff was busted for substance abuse in between all that, but all anyone has to do is Google the Jeff Hardy vs. Sting to get the big picture.

Anyway so the Hardys have been at it for well over 20 years at this point, and good on them to try and squeeze one last substantial run at a place like AEW where they’ll likely have a better shot at it than in the WWE.  That’s not the point of this post, to be one big retrospective on the Hardy Boyz, what served as the impetus of this post is the fact that over the last 20 years, and regardless of the fact that JNCO jeans basically died 20 years ago, it appears that the Hardy Brands® seem to be the only thing alive that’s keeping the clothing company intact, based on the fact that they still wear them or some knockoff variation of them, as their ring attire for the last two decades.

Sure, lots of long-time wrestlers establish a look and maintain them throughout the duration of their careers; the Rock ‘n Roll Express are both well into their 60’s and still bust out the tights and tassles, but the thing is, they’re still wrestling in wrestling gear.  The Hardy Boyz built their brand on pretty specific 1999, Avril Lavigne/emo boy street mallrat festival fashion, and for the last 20 years, they’ve stayed more or less the same, the whole time.

In one hand, good on them for consistency and really sticking to their guns, and establishing their brands.  But in the other hand, I just have this scenario in my mind, where I’m imagining Matt Hardy at his home, packing his rollaboard luggage for his next tour, hollering out to his wife, baby, have you seen my JNCOs??  With his heavy southern drawl and how he hangs on words like a real southern boy.  Matt Hardy is currently 47 years old, and is still going to work in JNCOs.  Jeff Hardy is 44 and is basically the creepy old guy at a My Chemical Romance concert.

I make myself laugh with this thought.

Anyway, good for the Hardys for always being fearless in the face of change, as far as their career directions go.  But from a branding standpoint, guys like Chris Jericho are immortalized for their creativity and ability to reinvent and repackage themselves.  Sticking with JNCOs for the last two decades seems more amusing than entertaining to me for some reason, and I have a hard time taking them serious as all-time greats as long as they continue to do so.  And I admit that I had, maybe two pairs of JNCOs myself; but that was in 1999, and by the time I started college, they were already relegated to the bottom of the closet, before quietly being thrown out when it was all but confirmed that the style was dead.

Yes it’s that time to talk about pooping again

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of the… no, it is definitively the best aspect about returning to the office, is the fact that I am able to get back to the gym, by virtue of the modest but adequate little gym inside my office’s building.  It’s free for tenants, has showers and complimentary towels, and the best part is that it’s hardly ever used.  Since I’ve been working out there, the maximum number of other people working out at the same time has me has never exceeded two people.

Knock on wood.

However, in spite of the fact that there aren’t a lot of people who work out on the regular as I do, the gym doors, are still somewhat commonly opened and entered, by people who believe the gym restrooms are the best place to poop.  Presumably they’re thinking they’re the most private, or least frequented, so that they can drop a deuce in perceived peace and cleanliness, but I don’t think any of these bozos seem to understand that I’ve already witnessed a number of people who use them that’s high enough for me to not even consider them myself if the need arises.

For those who have never had the opportunity to be mired in Office Space life, one notable behavior that most people don’t like to talk about but exists because everyone poops, is that people have a tendency to try and be discreet and do their work-time pooping on the down-low.  Either by coming in early, staying late, or in most cases with larger facilities, seeking out the bathrooms that are away from their daily peer groups, tucked away for privacy and/or sanitary reasons, or all of the above.

A Where’s Waldo of sorts, of the “best” bathrooms in the building.  I have a bathroom in the building that I think is the best bathroom for my needs.  It’s hidden behind the mailroom and based on the fact that most every time I go into it, I’m the one triggering the motion-sensing lights, which lets me know that nobody’s been there for a while, or the toilets still have the tint of green water from the last time they were disinfected.

Point is, everyone who works in an office probably has in the back of their mind, the bathrooms they like to use when they want some privacy and piece of mind.  And in my building, I’ve noticed that quite a number of people seem to feel that the gym bathroom is that bathroom for them, but unbeknownst to them, they would be sorely mistaken.

The men’s locker room has one toilet stall.  One.  Regardless of if I knew this wasn’t a good bathroom or not, I personally don’t like those odds, and wouldn’t consider it.  Presumably, the women’s locker room has two, due to the lack of need for a urinal, and make no mistake, women come into the gym to poop as frequently as men do, but at least they can hedge their bets with two toilets presumably to pick from.

Regardless, much like NASA gathers data on the all-relevant to space exploration conflicting between alligators versus sharks, solely based on the fact that it’s an interesting behavioral  anomaly that occurs near their Florida facilities, I have decided to start collating data of the pooping habits of the people in my building, who pop into the gym solely to poop, thinking it’s a nice and private bathroom for them to use.  It’ll be a fun little statistical gathering to see if any patterns or factoids emerge from it, and if anything all, just another topic I can dip into to write about in the future.

I also like to smugly meet the eyes of the people who come into the gym to poop; they know that I know what they’re doing, because they always roll in with no bags or gear, and beeline for the locker rooms.  If I weren’t masked up, they would see the facetious smirk on my face when they’re on their way out, because they think they’re being clever and pooping where it’s nice and safe, but based on the revolving door those poor toilets are, they might as well be crapping in a porta-potty during a marathon weekend.

AEW and the importance of storytelling

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Despite the fact that I probably come off as someone who hates AEW and and think WWE can do no wrong based on how much criticism I have for AEW, I don’t hate them at all.  It’s just that they do so much weird shit that makes me scratch my head, and if there’s anything at all about the promotion that I really don’t like, it would probably be Tony Khan, because he just comes off as this privileged mark with money and means to have created his own toy promotion, and is running it wackily but under the guise that it’s for the fans, and unfortunately a lot of people have gotten drunk off the Kool-aid.

In all fairness, I think WWE is pretty putrid these days, and I’m kind of the living embodiment of the popular meme that nobody hates professional wrestling more than professional wrestling fans, based on how it really does seem like I have nothing good to say.  However, I am willing to post about the shit that I do like, it’s just that there’s not a whole lot of it these days, unfortunately.

Anyway, mostly through scuttlebutt, I’ve been casually following AEW’s progress through the year, and aside from purchasing Ring of Honor, they are making some impactful moves and making a lot of noise in the industry.  The AEW x NJPW Forbidden Door show they’re going to have is going to be a pretty major deal for better or worse, and despite the fact that I will probably not see it seeing as how I have zero intentions of actually paying to watch a pay-per view anymore, I’ll still be very interested to see how the show shakes out.

The thing is though, as much as the internet seems to think it’s going to be the biggest show since the last Wrestlemania where they made up numbers to make it sound like the largest in history, there’s a ceiling to just how good Forbidden Door is going to be.  It’s going to be the same ceiling that hindered Double or Nothing, or pretty much any other AEW show since its inception: the sheer lack of comprehensive storytelling throughout the promotion.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t any storytelling at all, but rather it’s the fact that AEW doesn’t have much quality storytelling, save for a few exceptions where it’s clear that all available attribute points are put into a single arc; usually ones involving Kenny Omega or the Young Bucks, exhibiting nepotism at its most flagrant, seeing as how they’re still VPs of the company, no matter how much power Tony Khan has allegedly stripped them of.

Matt Hardy once was on record talking about how AEW doesn’t have any writers, and that much is very obvious considering how paper thin and lacking in any substance the vast majority of the promotion’s storylines end up being.  But it also verifies the weakness and validates the importance of quality storyline, because week after week, a promotion can’t slap together these repeatedly inane 5- or 6-man team matches full of big names in an attempt to give as many members of their horrifically bloated roster tv time, and actually expect anyone to care when there’s no story behind it.

Like CM Punk just won the AEW World championship from Hangman Adam Page.  How did that storyline materialize?  Punk got out of his feud with MJF and then one week after a match, he pantomimes he wants a belt.  Next thing you know he has a few face-to-face confrontations with Page, and a match is suddenly booked.  Seed planted, match had, title swapped, in less than three months.  Despite the rise of Hangman being one of the more interesting stories to have happened to the promotion, Tony Khan didn’t know what the fuck to do with him after he had reached the top of the mountain.  And unfortunately for Hangman, it’s his ass who has to do the job because of their lack of writing ability.

Taz’s son Hook, is a perfect example of the perils of not having writers, because here’s a guy that fans latched onto like gangbusters when he finally debuted, but instead of having him actually grow and make any progress in his character, or give him any meaningful storylines to embark on, AEW has paired him up with fucking Danhausen, whom I just don’t really see the appeal in because I’m old, but you’ve got this young silent killer paired up with basically a circus clown of a character, and somewhere it’s expected that Hook will actually grow from this?

To the fairness of AEW, they have demonstrated a legendary ability to open; talent debuts, seeds for stories, general ideas.  But that’s about all they can do, is start page 1.  I imagine Tony Khan is the kind of guy who has a folder on his desktop with like, at any given time, no less than 58 Untitled-1 (##) with ideas for storylines and bookings, but aren’t more than a paragraph.  But instead of actually hashing them out and trying to formulate some quality storylines out of them, he passes them onto the talent, tells them to start them up, and then wing it from there.  Last time I checked, professional wrestling and improv aren’t always mutually exclusive, but they also aren’t things that just anyone can do without experience.

Keith Lee and Swerve Strickland are good examples of guys who came in to a lot of buzz and impact for two seconds, but then absolutely jack shit was done with them since their debuts.  Worse off, they’re now paired as a tag team because the roster is so bloated, and now neither will really have any room to develop as singles guys.  Toni Storm and Ruby Soho are also good examples of acquisitions who came in to big pops, but are just treading water.

The bottom line is that AEW’s lack of storytelling is always going to be a hinderance, and isn’t helped by the sheer volume of the roster that needs some creative direction.  But good storytelling is capable of making diamonds out of one guy, or fifty guys, if it’s done well.  But seeing as how AEW has no writers, and the whole show seems to hinge on Tony Khan’s visions, the promotion will always have a ceiling that they’ll struggle to crack through, if they want to have any chance in the future of actually sustaining themselves in the battle to combat the WWE.

An observation about Obi Wan Kenobi

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

*No Plot Spoilers*

I went in blind as Ray Charles with Obi Wan Kenobi.  Didn’t even know it was in the works, didn’t know when it was going to drop, didn’t know a single plot point behind the entire series.  But when I heard that it had dropped, I figured why the heck not, considering mythical wife and I have mostly enjoyed all the other Disney+ original series based on Star Wars properties thus far.

So as stated above, I will give nothing away because I don’t feel like writing about anything other than the impetus to this post, and frankly nobody reads my shit anyway so it’s not like I have anyone but myself to appease.  But if there’s absolutely one observation that I feel like bringing up from the first two episodes of Obi Wan, it’s just, what the fuck are all these Asians doing in a Star Wars production?

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for and support moar Asian representation in media, but there’s been no secret that racist-ass Lucas hasn’t exactly been sprinting to the forefront at including Asians into their hallowed universe.  But two episodes into Obi Wan, and I’m seeing so many Asian people in the cast, credits and as extras, I’m beginning to wonder if this whole series is an HK knockoff that D+ absorbed the rights to or something and released themselves.

And Sung Kang in the show, as a presumable regular?  Get the fuck out of here.  Han from Fast & Furious, as a character in Star Wars.  This is unbelievable and unprecedented.  Surely, he has to be the first Korean guy to crack a visual role in Star Wars, right?

We’ll see what happens to his character as the season progresses, but I for one am tickled pink at just how laughably blatant the Star Wars universe is trying to inject diversity into the IP.  Because nothing says progress like corporate initiatives, statistical evidence and the need for representation in order to tap into demographics and their wallets!

Love Death + Robots S3: The magic is gone for me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t have a lot of time to myself much less time to watch television, so I really do have to put a lot of time and thought into just what exactly I want to spend my limited time watching.  When I saw that Love Death + Robots was dropping its third season, I made a point to prioritize that, since I was a fan of the first two seasons.

However, it’s worth mentioning that the second season wasn’t really that close at capturing the magic of the first season, and I had hopes that S3 could work out all of the shortcomings of S3 and deliver a banger of a season that would be the perfect reprieve from daily life, at very time economical and bite-sized episodes that I really relish at this stage in my life.

Well unfortunately, it saddens me to say that such was not the case, and as was the case with S2, season 3 continued that downward trend for me.  The best way for me to describe it would be saying that David Fincher began to turn the knob up on how David Fincher-y he could make the series, in the sense that he’s notorious for allowing things to go off the rails on a long enough timeline, and by the time Jibaro, the last episode in the season was over, I was just sitting there thinking, what the fuck?

The funny thing is that Fincher served as a producer and the one episode that he directed was actually my favorite one, but the collection of stories as a whole were a little too all over the place, and if I really had to put my finger on it, I’d say that the season as a whole was definitely lacking in the whole Love part of Love Death and Robots.  I feel like the first season captured a good balance between the three core elements of the series which is why it was so good, and as the series and seasons progressed, the stories began to lack the balance which made it to alluring.

That being said, S3 still had a moment or two of collective brilliance, and if anything at all, the technology and varying artistic executions of each episode are still respectable and visually stimulating to see the variety.  I don’t think I’ll be as excited for future seasons, if there are any in the pipeline, but I’d still watch them, but perhaps at a much lower priority, because as much as I loved the first season, the magic is gone for me now.

Regardless, here’s my rankings of the episodes, as I’ve done with the prior seasons:

  1. Bad Traveling (#2)
  2. Swarm (#6)
  3. Night of the Mini Dead (#4)
  4. Mason’s Rats (#7)
  5. In Vaulted Halls Entombed (#8)
  6. Three Robots: Exit Strategies (#1)
  7. Jibaro (#9)
  8. Kill Team Kill (#5)
  9. The Very Pulse of the Machine (#3)

MLB x KBO would be pretty awesome

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Interesting: MLB and KBO have been having discussions over some collaborative projects such as having games in each others’ venues and the possibility of MLB vs. KBO all-star exhibitions

At this juncture in my life, I don’t really have that much drive or even want to go to any baseball games.  Usual spiel about how I have no time and how I’m trying to be more selective of what I do with it when I have it, and frankly I don’t like crowds, I don’t like dealing with the aggravation of parking and traveling to and from venues, so the idea of going to baseball games isn’t nearly as appealing to me now as it might have been many years ago when I had more time and zero children.

However, if something manifests from this potential collaboration between MLB and the KBO, that would definitely pique my interest.  Especially if it ended up with KBO games being played at MLB facilities, that would definitely be interesting to me.  I’ve long wanted to go watch a KBO game, but the opportunities have never been available in the two times that I’ve been home to the Motherland; the first time was during the Korean Series, and the Doosan Bears basically closed out the series right as I had arrived, and the second time I went was in the winter when there was no baseball.

So if ever there was a possibility that KBO would hold games in America to try and raise awareness of their game, I would definitely be interested in going to see that.  And I’d definitely be interested if there were ever any KBO vs. MLB all-star exhibitions, although I get the impression that those would probably take place in Korea over the United States, much like how MLB sporadically does an MLB vs. NPB series in Japan every so often.

Obviously, I’d be pulling for KBO squads against MLBers, even if there were some Braves and/or Freddie Freeman on the squad, because if it really came down to it, I’d rather see Koreans beat Major Leaguers.  I’d hope to see a repeat of the 2006 World Baseball Classic, where Team Korea trounced Team USA at Angel Stadium, and honestly?  I guess I think MLB is so arrogant, that I’m content to even see Japan own them too, and although it seems highly unlikely considering the quality of KBO pitching, I’d be over the moon if a KBO all-star team no-hit an MLB squad of cobbled together players called an all-star team, much like Japan did a long time ago.

Either way, none of this happens without this collaboration coming to light, so here’s hoping that MLB and the KBO can work something out, so that I can have something fairly unique and novel to help me regain some interest beyond the casual level again, one day.