This stream highlight cuts this out but the orginal Japanese dialogue is uh lets just say much more direct and proud about this then you would think. 
Writing like this is making me genuinely worried about the LeonxSherry lathing from creeps. 
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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This is great. I don't see the problem at all.
Every character doesn't need to be likeable or a good person. Alex marrying his cousin that he grew up with feels right. He has the aesthetic of an Alabama hick.
Like yeah I get it, but they reduced all of SF3 to a footnote, literally, all he says about it is "I fought a lot of weirdos". You know, the game where Alex was supposed to be the main character, the game that canonically happens between 6 and 5. Instead of anything on the events of SF3, we get this.
Yeah that's a totally different point I guess. I don't know anything about SF3 though, just that I don't really see a problem with having a heinous dude with a heinous life in there even if he is personally oblivious to how heinous he is and believes he's a good person.
The problem isn't whether or not he is oblivious to how heinous it is, but whether or not the story is oblivious.
I struggle to see that image of him looking at this person as a child and then marrying her in the exact same picture as anything other than the story being self-aware it's sus behaviour.
I literally can't interpret this in any way other than "lol this is a comic about a grooming incident". It seems totally intentional to me but I completely get that's not going to be seen by anyone but the media-literate.
This isn't a matter of other people lacking media literacy, this is a matter of you projecting your values onto a piece, because your argument is literally "the thing being depicted is bad in my view, therefore it is being depicted as being bad in the narrative's view." You have yet to present an argument for explaining how to establish the view of the narrative here. You have not presented a basis for discerning an anti-grooming narrative from one that romanticizes this paternalizing predation.
Seriously, just imagine someone who was openly into this particular brand of grooming (which should be very legible to people in our cultural contexts because this used to be considered romantic in popular writing!). What are you claiming they would do differently?
I believe it was just such a person who did write this, and therefore they would not necessarily do anything differently, but someone interested in writing an anti-grooming narrative could, I don't know, show just show even the slightest bit of the abusive "reality" behind the supposed Humbert-Humbert-Vision going on here, of Alex controlling her and a look of distress or despair that his austere gaze is oblivious to or ignores. Don't let the whole thing just be radiant light and sincere smiles from her, let her actual perspective leak in so the viewer can see it even if Alex refuses to.
I feel like this is getting unnecessarily heated so I'm gonna dip
I apologize for making you feel that way. After you started talking about how only media literate people could understand how right you are while basically just saying your evidence is a gut reaction, I thought it would be good to delineate as clearly as I could why it doesn't make sense and how someone interested in media literacy could approach things more constructively. Clearly I need to improve how I convey tone.
I didn't say only media-literate would see i'm right. I said only the media-literate would recognise what they're doing with that art strip, that it's an entirely intentional grooming collage.
I understand that it's still bad to display this without clear criticism for those in the audience who won't see that, which is probably most of the audience. I have not actually disagreed with you or anyone else here on that.
My mistake for mischaracterizing the scope of your claim.
Regardless, you're not talking about media literacy as such, because identifying the thing in the picture as grooming isn't any sort of nuanced understanding of how media works, it's just knowing what grooming is and making a connection to the literal events on the screen that they fit that definition. Media literacy would involve assessing the specific artistic choices made in the process of that depiction, which are completely consistent with someone who is pro-grooming and lack any evidence of being anti-grooming except that grooming is bad so one might have a gut response that when grooming is depicted, it's meant to be understood as bad. That is not media literacy.
He also was based on Hulk Hogan originally so make of that what you will
Hugo (the other grappler from SF3), is a reference to Andre the Giant.
They have a unique entrance that references Wrestlemania III.
That too.
The question isn't just about characters needing to be likeable or a good person (that is blatantly not the case and there are like 4 different unrepentant murderers on the roster already), but how the incestuous relationship and Alex more broadly are being represented.
This argument is tacitly doing the sort of thing people do all the time when defending heinous shit in anime, where if they think something is bad (or are pretending they do), then they just impose their values (or their audience's values) on the work and gloss over whether the Bad Thing is truly being portrayed in a critical manner or not. I've seen lots of people talk about this or that manga/anime that depicts heinous shit because the heinous shit appeals to certain people and they just ignore the part where it's trying to appeal to people, or accuse you of it appealing to you if you point out this obvious intention. I've seen it repeatedly, even on this site, because people would rather engage in question-begging and slinging absurd accusations to prevent their favorite slop receiving criticism, though to be clear I don't think that's your motivation here.
Aren't all the stories in Street Fighter are presented from the POV of that character. To Alex, this is a glorious wonderful happy ending where he has repented for his sins and become a good dude. That is the story in his head. This is Alex's happy ending.
Like, fine I can see your point that the ONLY depiction of it currently is this positive one. But I am otherwise fine with it existing if it is developed further with others criticising it.
people are not media-literate enough for this, certainly not gamers.
they're all "lol he's a cousin fucker" and i've only seen one person bring up the grooming dynamic.
This is not a good argument, partly because the POV doesn't just warp reality like Pyro-Vision, even if it lends itself to understanding the terms they see things in, meaning evil things can still look evil (e.g. many Bison and Akuma endings), and partly because even when you win you don't necessarily get a happy ending (e.g. Urien in Third Strike, where he gets thwarted by his brother), and it sometimes even involves the character realizing they were wrong and having a change of heart (e.g. Remy in Third Strike, where he finally abandons his Mr. Freeze complex).
The story mode endings aren't "here's a world where the character is right," or even always "here's a world where the character achieves their goals," just something along the lines of "here's a world where the character did as well as they could have," which might still be an obviously terrible outcome either because of evil intentions or relative incompetence.
Then the game in its current state, based on the information provided in this conversation, has done a decidedly bad rather than great thing, but there is a chance it will be improved later. I wouldn't hold your breath on it though, since these sorts of things often go basically untouched by the other writing in the series and by the time more is being written for Alex, this is liable to be swept under the rug.
Seeing this shit in my inbox from the mod of c/anime is wild. This is a sign to log off today for sure. Bruh.
What? What's the problem exactly? M Bison literally performs genocides and he's a staple of the franchise so characters who are bad people aren't exactly an issue are they?
Why does Alex need to have no character flaws? I don't get it. The dude looks like fucking Axel Rose who I associate closely with the "probably dates his cousin" look.
Bison is a villain! Characters fight to stop him! Multiple plots of entire games are centered in large part on thwarting his evil plans! The same goes for several other villains, except that I think the only one that meets Bison's scale both in terms of being in multiple games and being that evil is Gill.
A character flaw isn't just something you personally think reflects poorly on the character, it's a dynamic of the narrative that the story treats it as being a problem. Does the story treat this as a problem? Bison is more character flaw than person, and Akuma gets hyped up but still gets out-enlightened by Ryu, and many other villains just get trashed on until they are either forgotten or become less evil (like Sagat).