This is an episode I have been dreading since starting this whole thing, which is probably why it took so long to come out. For a game series that trades in broad stereotypes, I've never felt comfortable with Elena. She always felt just a little off to me. Turns out, the more digging I did, the more she is to Street Fighter what "Brown Sugar" is to the Rolling Stones; something that was never a good idea.
To be fair to her, Capcom hasn't exactly been kind to Black characters. Balrog/Boxer is the definition of the "angry Black man" trope, just to give an example. In Elena's case, though, what probably started as good intentions came out in ugly ways, especially since, according to basically all of the art that Capcom has published with her in it, she's basically the teenage fuck bunny of the series. That makes things a whole lot worse.
Trust me when I say that there was a lot I left on the cutting room floor in terms of Elena and how icky things are with her. And also trust me that I didn't write this episode in a vacuum. I'm a 40 year-old white dude, after all, and I needed other sets of eyes on this script before I even began collecting footage. This passed through a few hands of Black creators that I trust and a PhD faculty member of Gender and Race studies just to be sure I wasn't veering out into a lane I had no business in.
But that doesn't mean that this episode won't rile some people up. To them, well, that's the breaks. Elena comes off as a racist character to me. That's what this videos about.
Luckily, Dudley is (somehow) the polar opposite to this, but we'll tackle that soon.
