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maxwell-grant · 10 months

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I'm curious for your thoughts on Dan Hibiki

Dan is real special to me mainly because he was the first time I actually had fun cosplaying, in terms of putting the outfit together and attending the event. I was very young at the time but he was my second cosplay, with the first technically being Bison the year before but I barely remember going as Bison and the costume was basically rented whole, where as with Dan I actually had to take the time to put him together peacemeal.

Looking for shitty ponytails and testing out hair gels and glue to get that doofy spit curl right, ruining a judo gi by cutting the sleeves and dying it pink, painting the eyebrows and kanji in the back and practicing those dumb faces and animations of his, and I was really happy that day with the reception I got. Best part of that day by far was when they were doing this cosplay wrestling thing where people could sign up to enter the ring, and I got to really ham it up with the taunts and pratfalls and Dan-isms I memorized from heart (and I did play the fucker a lot in SSFIV, not even ironically, his Hurricane Kick and normals were really solid in IV) and just, one of the most fun times I ever had. I think of Dan pretty fondly for that if nothing else.

Although frankly I think I like him a little less nowadays than I used to, mainly because a lot of the other characters grew on me more or got better redesigns over the years where as Dan's just, Dan, and Dan's always gonna be Dan, no more no less, little room for improvement because he was just kinda perfect at what he set out to do from the go. I think some of that also has to do with the fact that he pulled Blanka big time into his joke character orbit for well over a decade and I'm not really a fan of that? Idk it definitely got better with 5 and especially 6, just for a while there Blanka's role as being primarily Dan and Sakura's dumb sidekick really sucked and made me resent them a little, still can't say I'm too big a fan even if he doesn't take a backseat to them as much anymore.

Dan becoming essentially one of the co-protagonists of Street Fighter over the years I think has a lot to do with the devs figuring out over the decades that there was a lot more they could do with the character, besides taking potshots at SNK (and honestly in that regard, I feel like Remy does it better, in spite or maybe because they don't play him as a joke on purpose). And I do think Dan has several legs up other fighting game joke characters and not just because he came first, not just because he's funny, but because he's filling in some important niches and they ground him in just enough legitimacy, from a lore and gameplay perspective, that he's worth bringing back. Dan is a joke, but he is also important, in his own way, he's an important character for Street Fighter to have.

If your setting and story are defined as a gathering of the greatest fighters and representatives of martial arts and countries the world over, you kinda do have to address what does a Bad Fighter, The Worst Fighter, representing The Worst Martial Arts, looks like, and basing it on "the guys that ripped us off" is the icing on the gag. Both Dan and Sakura were designed around parodies of the Art of Fighting characters, but they did the right call in assigning Yuri Sakazaki's childish braggart antics to Dan and letting Sakura be treated more seriously.

As much as I may complain that Dan dragged Blanka into the funnyman idiot orbit, Dan's existence prevents a lot of other characters from becoming parodies of themselves (more so than they became, at least), at minimum it definitely pumped the breaks on Blanka and Sakura from doing that because, no matter what, they'd always have to suck less than Dan, because nobody (cept maybe Rufus) is allowed to suck more than Dan (I feel like Sean's joke status was a total misfire, but more on him when I got to Sean).

Dan also works because he's got a legitimate backstory and motivation to be here, and to be the way he is: His father was the one to take out Sagat's eye and Sagat mauled him to death in the ring for it, and desperately driven to take revenge, he took up training under Ryu and Ken's master Gouken until being expelled when Gouken learned his true intentions (and the last time a man with power-hungry intentions was trained in Ansatsuken, Akuma happened), and so Dan had to fill out the rest of his training on his own, which is why his playstyle is the way it is, why he's like Ryu but bad. Dan fills out the other end of a scale occupied by the prior shotos, the worst practicioner there is, the lame and pathetic counterpart to Ryu and Ken opposite Akuma as the strongest. Akuma is Bad Ryu, and Dan is Bad Ryu but in a totally opposite sense. He had symmetry with the existing characters and his backstory was treated with as much seriousness as he can be allowed to have, which isn't much most of the time, but just enough.

Dan being a joke from an in-universe also wound up lending a lot of meaning to Sagat's character arc, because Dan became the catalyst for Sagat's redemption. Sagat was confronted by this pathetic fool wholly consumed by revenge and struggling fruitlessly to defeat a stronger martial artist, and he saw himself in Dan, himself and his obsession with Ryu and the lows he'd stooped to in order to achieve that revenge, and so he lets Dan win, giving Dan his one and only victory that we know of. Sagat, at his lowest point emotionally in the series, who is still supremely prideful and regal and very much not a nice man even as a hero.

The strongest man alive letting the weakest man beat him in a fight to save said man from ending up just like him. If it was against anyone else, it wouldn't be anywhere near as meaningful, but starting the supremely prideful and mighty Sagat's redemption arc by having him realize the futility of his vendetta and let himself get beaten by Dan of all people, The Final Boss letting The Joke Character humiliate him, I think was a very inspired choice.

Much as I enjoy his characterization, I do miss a little how Dan was depicted sometimes in the Alpha series, where he'd be treated with a little more seriousness. Like in the backstory blurb describing how Gou died and how Dan still wakes up with nightmares about it, or in Sakura Ganbaru where Dan's kind of a comedic straightman to Sakura and they take some steps to show that Dan IS knowledgeable and observant about ki and martial arts, and is even pretty good at beating average fighters in local circuits; it's just he's Dan, y'know, and all his hard work and self-mythologizing can't make up for his incomplete training, ego issues and him hanging around Sakura and Blanka, who are freakishly talented and either quickly surpass his teachings or, in Blanka's case, never actually need it.

I don't like the Udon comics very much but I do think they get this right, I like the emphasis they put on Dan having a genuinely impressive ability to take a beating and playing up Dan as a guy who gets up to all these offscreen adventures and picked up all these other skills to make up for his incomplete training (and him becoming Chairman of the CWA I thought was pretty inspired). It nicely reflects what the games have done with him, where he's always showing off new skills and moves added to his playstyle, his fireballs get a little farther and stronger every game (and he doesn't fling himself back when firing them anymore), some characters even comment on his progress and potential. Dan is a joke by World Warrior standards, but by regular person or fighter standards, he can be impressive.

And I think Dan also stuck around the way he did because there's a certain necessity for a character who pokes holes at the premise and mythology, not just a comic relief for levity sake but someone who's there to help the writing avoid the pitfalls of excessive self-seriousness. A character who's an absurd cartoon of a martial artist but not in the cool badass way all the other characters are absurd cartoons of martial artists, instead someone who's kinda lame and full of himself the way that, really, most martial artists, especially self-taught, can be. Everyone on Street Fighter, no matter how nice they are as people or what truly motivates them, is joining the tournament sure that their martial arts are the strongest and that they can and will make their way to the top by beating all the other inferior fighters standing in their way. Dan is like that, it's just that nobody takes him seriously for it. He may not even be the funniest joke character in fighting games, but nobody takes as incisive a punchline to the genre as Dan.

Dan, in his own right, does represent an important, maybe even the most important, facet of martial arts there is: the kind that everyone does when they start out or just don't bother growing as people or fighters. In my experience, myself very much not excluded, the gyms and dojos of the world are full of Dan Hibikis trying to be something more by mythologizing themselves into former losers turned invincible fighting machine blowhards the minute they learn how to kick above their heads or take a punch in the gut, whose training is perpetually incomplete, who think they get to teach others, and who go out there thinking they'll get to show off that invincibility any second now and that once everyone sees how badass these karate chops are, or how much ass I can kick when playing Smash Bros or KOF or Street Fighter, I'll show em all how cool I am, just you mess with me and I'll show you my flying kick WA-TCHAAA! *miss* HUP, WORYEEAAHH *crash*

#street fighter #replies tag #dan hibiki #dan #capcom #fighting games #fgc #sagat #blanka

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