Cindi Mayweather
Member
Forgive me if this has been mentioned earlier, but UDON artist Omar Dogan (always one of my favourite artists from the SF comic), drew this on his Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BIEyIbLhdYu/?taken-by=omar.dogan.5
...and he himself lamented that SFV has taken its female characters in a more crass direction, and he missed the sense of playfulness that used to be present in the series artwork.
SF has never been perfect in how it represented its women, but I always loved how there was soooo much official artwork from artbooks and such, portraying the characters in down-to-earth or even comical situations.
Chun-Li/Cammy's endings in SSFII:
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Some art from artbooks:
...and it's just an atmosphere that SFIV and SFV don't seem to have, y'know? We don't ever get to see those kinds of ordinary, everyday character moments in the recent storylines or artwork. I dunno, I just feel like it's such a waste.
With Cammy especially, while the thong leotard started in Alpha and some of its victory poses, it was only SFIV that applied it to her Delta Red outfit. In SFII it had more coverage, but then IV decided to take that away and make the buttshots into a bigger focus (e.g. that infamous intro, her SSFIV artwork...).
R. Mika wasn't a blatantly sexual character in Alpha 3. She was goofy, over-designed, and provided a lot of comedy with her silly animations. But then V comes around, and it feels like all the fun and sincerity is gone and replaced with lewdness. I almost wish she was never brought back because of how much I hate how shameless the dialogue around her and her portrayal (her artwork is a damn boobs-and-butt pose) has become.
I definitely see where he's coming from and it was fascinating to see that coming from someone so involved in the series. I dunno, this is probably kind of a mess, but I think Omar really nailed why I'm bothered so much by how the classic characters and ESPECIALLY the female ones are portrayed in IV and V. There's an element of playfulness to the characters that just seems to have been lost, and some of what's replaced it comes off as pretty tasteless.
(Maybe it's just Ono's SF in general I don't care for. I hate how it feels like under him, the humourous aspects of the characters have become less subtle and more beating-you-over-the-head with them. Birdie being turned into a doughnut-loving glutton is the worst example of this to me.)
One aspect I'm sick of Ono's SF is how every stage has a crowd of people being super into it and there's a bunch of stupid goofy shit going on in the background like dancing bears. Bison's stage in V is amazing in terms of design and then you've got people chasing robots and all of this stupid quackery going on in the background. Karin's stage is fantastic but honestly no npc needs to be there but the butler. The npcs in the China, India, and Kanzuki beach stage make sense, but there's no more atmospheric stages like Ryu's in II, or the grass field/snow Japanese temple/Thaialnd stage like in Alpha 2. They exist in some form (like day/night version of the waterfall stage) but they're exceptions.