If you type “Why is Street Fighter’s Juri so popular?” into a reddit search (making doubly sure your NSFW filters are on first, of course) you’ll quickly get the most obvious answers: she’s hot, she’s got a sexy attitude, and… feet. In essence, she’s a waifu that tons of people in the Street Fighter community find attractive to engage with either by playing as her, seeing her story unfold, or appreciating the fan art and cosplays she’s so often represented through.
Reddit isn’t wrong, but there’s a good bit more to the character of Juri than just feet and sex appeal, as plenty of other roster members from over the years have more or less checked these same boxes without hitting anywhere near the same levels of success.
We can hone in on one part of her design that doesn’t come up as often as others, and that’s the fact that Capcom developed her to be an anti-hero. Juri debuted around 2010 with the release of Super Street Fighter 4, a time where the sine wave of anti-hero love in popular culture was close to a zenith.
There’s a lot that could go into why people were particularly in the mood for baddies to replace goody two shoe protagonists as the main focus of games, film, and television, but the sheer number of anti-hero main characters is evidence enough that this was the way to go if you wanted the best chances at developing a beloved character.
Walter White, Tony Soprano, Craig’s James Bond, Kratos, Bayonetta, The Dark Knight, and many, many more such figures were all out bending rules and dancing around (sometimes barreling through) questions of morality, but they were all doing so in ways that were entertainingly badass enough for us to put their inevitably horrible ends out of mind long enough to enjoy the rides.
The rise in anti-hero action was especially palpable in video games as offering players moral choices and letting them be more that just a traditional good guy became an extremely common theme.
Capcom saw this and basically decided to reinvent one of their most iconic characters, Chun-Li, with an anti-hero slant.
Just like Chun, Juri was a good girl who lost her parents at a young age thanks to the ruthlessly and chaotic evil that is M. Bison.
Unlike Chun, Juri decided to go on a path of vengeance without caring about justice or the law. In fact, in many ways she embraced the evil and incorporated it into her personality, becoming sadistic.
Pair this with sex, feet, and maybe another characteristic or two and you have yourself a recipe for one of the absolute most successful characters in all of Street Fighter; a figure that may even rival Ryu one day as the face of the franchise should she stay on this trajectory.
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