We recently published an episode of Talk and Block in which we brought up a handful of characters we think would make good returners for Street Fighter 6 DLC, and M. Bison was at the top of the list. While plenty of viewers agreed with the sentiment, a great many did not, which I was somewhat surprised to see.
While I’m not a particular fan of playing the character, my more recent studies of deeper Street Fighter lore and character significance have routed me to and from Bison more times than I could can count. This in turn led to the realization that Bison is an incredibly deep character who’s design serves the Street Fighter franchise on more levels than you’d think; maybe he actually should be a mainstay?
There are three levels on which Bison makes notable contributions to Street Fighter and the first is the most obvious: He’s a really good bad guy.
In many ways, Capcom built Street Fighter out from Bison as the central figure of it all. He’s the one who puts on the World Warrior tournament, he’s the motivation for so many characters to join the fighting (they either want to kill or serve him), and he’s an easily hate-worthy villain who does villainous things.
Dig a bit deeper and you get to Bison’s conceptual significance: he holds power as his highest priority, he uses it to control people against their will, and he uses chaos as a means of gaining it.
Seeing Bison as this power-seeking agent of chaos and division, we get into another arena of interest as he’s a central hub of Street Fighter storytelling. Here we can ask the questions “what happens when the concept of revenge runs into corrupted power?” That’s exactly the story of Sagat, and it’s a well-told one.
Balrog and Vega could represent greed and envy, respectively, so what happens when those deadly sins join up with chaos wielding power? Ryu is balance, Chun-Li is justice for the afflicted, and Rose is order; what happens when those ideas collide with the ones Bison represents?
We dig into all this and more (there’s a whole third layer we haven’t even touched yet) in the full video below. I may have put on more of a “Philosiraptor” hat on for this one, but it’s been a fun research project and I hope you enjoy and come to a realization or two you may have missed in the past.
Please give the video a watch and let me know what you think of Bison and whether or not he should be included as a playable character in SF6 for his significance in the Street Fighter franchise alone.