Earlier this week, Capcom said it would be revising certain text passages in Street Fighter 6 that reveal long-time series veteran Alex had ended up in an incestous relationship with his second cousin and step-sister Patricia. Director Takayuki Nakayama apologized for any “confusion” and said the company would be updating “misleading” parts of the story in a future update. At first, this didn’t seem to make any sense considering how straightforward the details appeared, but now, we might have more insight into what Capcom plans to do to address the situation, and it’s not really helping anything, actually.
Alongside the announcement of a future patch, Capcom released a short story called “A Toast Between Fathers” that focuses on Tom, Patricia’s father and Alex’s first cousin once removed/adoptive father, reflecting on the two’s relationship growing up, which was very much a sibling relationship. When I first read the story, I remarked that I didn’t know how it was supposed to help the situation, as it just solidified that this whole thing is pretty fucking weird. However, the Japanese version of the story is more explicit about some of the details, and it appears to retcon much of Alex’s story up to this point.
A translation, posted on Reddit, shows that the Japanese-language version of the story lays out many of the same details as the English version. Tom sits at a bar and imagines talking about Patricia and Alex’s relationship with Alex’s deceased dad. According to old Street Fighter lore, Tom is the cousin of Alex’s mother, and was notably close with his father as a sparring partner. So the intent here is that Tom is telling the other man that their kids got together. The short story goes out of its way to avoid talking about Tom’s blood relation to Alex, as the fighter’s mother isn’t really brought up at all. Without Tom’s cousin bridging the gap, you’d think that Alex and Patricia were merely kids who knew each other growing up, and that Alex, as the older one, protected Patricia over the years.
The other aspect of the story that has fans upset is that the Japanese version seems to retcon Alex’s backstory of growing up with Tom and Patricia, instead making it sound like he only visited, and stopped coming around as often when he was a teenager, instead living on his own.
It feels like a really roundabout way to try and salvage the romantic relationship at the expense of Alex’s previously established story. And even then, it doesn’t actually fundamentally change the incest of it all, as ignoring Alex’s mother in the short story by centering the relationship between Tom and Alex’s fathers doesn’t undo that. I really don’t know what Capcom is trying to do here, but you’re supposed to dig up, not further down.
