The internet, as it is wont to do, got itself in something of a kerfuffle this week with the revelation (if you can call it that) that Street Fighter V character R. Mika’s butt-smacking taunt had been toned-down somewhat. To quote Street Fighter boss Yoshinoro Ono, “Those changes came up internally. We decided to remove that because we want the biggest possible number of people to play, and we don’t want to have something in the game that might make someone uncomfortable.” Take a look at commentary on this topic, however, and the usual cries of censorship and stifling creative freedom come up again and again. They are completely unfounded. I’m not saying this as an opinion, I’m saying this as a fact.
Street Fighter V is a creative work that is still in development. If the work’s creators decide they want to change elements of it before it reaches market, that is their prerogative. To not do that would be stifling creative freedom. To not do that would be censorship.
As for the censorship of R. Mika herself as a character, let’s look at the facts. She’s a female wrestler with a cup size that defies belief, wearing an incredibly low-cut top and ass-less pants. There’s little getting around the fact that her outfit is ludicrous, but let’s put that aside for a moment – it’s a trope of fighting games that hasn’t shaken in several decades and likely won’t start soon. However to say that she herself has been somehow censored just isn’t true.
Secondly, let’s look at the animation in question. A lot of the supposed furor is to do with the fact that R. Mika should be able to behave as she pleases, and not allowing her to slap her ass is somehow a violation of that freedom. What a lot of people seem to miss in this is that R. Mika is not a person, she’s been designed. She doesn’t have a ‘right’ to behave the way she pleases, a group of developers are creating that behavior from the ground up. Even more interestingly, if you compare the old and new cuts of it, you can see that it actually hasn’t changed at all. What’s really changed is that the camera now no longer swoops down between her legs to look up at her butt while she’s slapping it.
I’m not going to debate the merits of slapping one’s butt. I’ll leave that to the experts. However forcing the camera to take a money shot of her crotch before she performs her super is not only objectifying but also just…. really lame. Creating a sexualised character is one thing – and again, I’m not here to debate that point – but forcing the camera into deliberately pervy positions is something else entirely, and we’ve seen too much of it recently in otherwise excellent games like Bayonetta 2 and Metal Gear Solid V. Gamers are not primarily teenage boys anymore, and in 2015 this kind of thing comes off as childish and tiresome. Capcom made the right choice. This shouldn’t be a debate any more.
RSS