Policing Bodies: The '80s Action Hero in Streets of Rage 4

This longread studies the '80s action hero in Streets of Rage 4 and similar media—how they cultivates heroic bodies that uphold the status quo, which polices bodies in media more generally.

Apart from an introduction and conclusion, there are three main sections:

• Part 1: Criticizing Heroes
• Part 2: Room for Heroes?
• Part 3: Marginalized Bodies

Note: This piece was originally written in 8/4/2021; i.e., as part of my now-discontinued book, Neoliberalism in Yesterday's Heroes. In the past, I've released pieces of "Policing Bodies" for public consumption (re: exhibit 34c2, "Fatal Homecomings"). However, it also mentions during the "All the World" book promotion, the last one for Sex Positivity (2023). To celebrate, I've finally just decided to release "Policing Bodies" as is. —Perse, 5/5/2025

P.S., I never got around to adding photos for it; I will add some soon!

Introduction

"I want a hero," said Lord Byron's Don Juan—want, in his case, meaning need; i.e., "to want for." Byron was mocking the idea that heroes are useful, with Juan existing largely for himself. It's easy to think of the hero as good, and the villain as bad. And if Byron's antihero wasn't heroic, thus good, then they must be bad, or villainous. 

This kind of reasoning might seem basic, but it's exactly the type of simplistic thinking that traditional heroes promote. There is no middle ground, only good or bad. The powerful rely on heroes, specifically cops, to routinely keep them in power. Heroic media reliably meets this need by functioning as neutral entertainment, advertising traditional values through nostalgia that justifies and celebrates the existence of cops. 

The Streets of Rage is one such franchise. A byproduct of the Bush Sr. era, its action heroes function as cops by appealing to a fundamental moral core. This stance isn't explicitly Christian, but still performs through a good-versus-evil binary that attacks the marginalized. Axel, Blaze and Adam are all former cops; they don't look like them and that's the point. While they might not have a badge and a gun, their role is functionally the same as those who do: defend property and the state. 

While conservatives like Nixon openly demonized the poor, Liberalism focuses on the defense of the state as vital, even just. Joe Biden, for example, was famously Tough on Crime for decades, delivering a fiery plea to "take back the streets" for Bill Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill. "Lock the sonofabitch up!" Biden cried, and so the bill did. Never mind that it didn't work. Yes, many more people were jailed. Not only were these people were mostly black. The bill required more jails, hence more money from the state. Since most, if not all of that money was spent on jails, preventative care was ignored. This kept power in the hands of cops, thus the state.

Axel and his friends meet these bipartisan needs just fine: They have no desire for cool, detached justice. They want furious revenge against an enemy who deserves violence. In doing so, their street justice is just as meaningless, cruel and detached as the state's monopoly on violence through regular policing. Official heroes at least present themselves as impartial, reasoned champions (when in reality they operate through emotions that are justified by the state). Conversely the vigilantism in Streets of Rage is predicated on anger as openly expressed by a neutral, unaffiliated party. 

This lack of shame or accountability would seem to alienate Axel and friends from proper law enforcement. In truth, they're function as undercover cops, performing the same violence and control against poor people that normal cops specialize in. The police's role isn't to stop violence, but control other people through an ideological framework that promotes violence. 

Presentation is key. Police are lethal and largely above the law. By certifying the police as righteous, the state turns fear of the police into respect, even love. The more righteous they are, the more violent they can be. So they must increasingly look the part. This can be through their equipment, but also their bodies. 

Because Streets of Rage is a beat-'em-up and not a shooter, we'll be focusing on bodies and pugilism. Axel Stone and Blaze Fielding symbolize power through themselves. Their bodies are living weapons. Said weapons are cultivated by the state; if not in direct cooperation with the bodies' owners, the state can still use these bodies to meet its own needs. 

Moving forward, this paper shall 

• Explore how the '80s action hero enforces body stereotypes, and how the owners of these bodies are treated by police.
• Examine the traditional gender values reinforced by stereotypical male and female bodies in heroic media.
• Examine bodies that veer away from so-called "heroic" norms—not just "hard" women, but soft boys with feminine bodies. 
• Examine the critical role and value of marginalized bodies, but also their heroic positions as imprisoned, shamed and victimized by traditional standards.

Trigger Warning #1: This paper explores many heavy topics, including police abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and sexual abuse. 

Part 1: Criticizing Heroes

This section criticizes the police function of the '80s action hero in Streets of Rage 4. 

While it's true that people clamor for heroes in times of want and guidance, police heroes traditionally exist to enforce ideological norms, be those gender, race, or sex. Rather than explicitly state them, American companies advertise borders and paragons: 

• There are lines and they mustn't be crossed; those who do are villains, and must be fought. 
• Only the chosen few can police these boarders.

These are arbitrary concepts that divide power in ways useful to the state. They can manipulate those on either side of the binary to keep people off-balance and distracted.

We'll explore these tactics in the following subsections:

• The Veneer of Neutrality
• Nostalgia and Allegory
• Cops-in-Disguise
• Propaganda
• Reap the Whirlwind
• The Solution (for Starters)
• A Caveat

The Veneer of Neutrality

So many ‘80s action stories endorse the "might is right" dynamic within a neutral, nostalgic framework. Streets of Rage was, and has always been, tough on crime, demonizing the poor by framing them as soldiers of a rival tyrant—in this case, a crime lord scapegoat—while rogue "civilians" take matters into their own hands. This centrist fantasy presents the enemy as an army of ninjas or cyborgs the militant hero can duel. By reducing both sides to negotiations of routinely applied force, good and evil are equalized.

Alas, the fantasy levels the playing field in ways that grievously ignore actual imbalances. For one, the conflict presents one side as strictly good and the other strictly bad. Cartoon enemies are walking clichés meant to internalize simple politic attitudes through basic, conditioned responses. These attitudes are exercised in defense of home, an idea supplied to children through nostalgia until it becomes their entire worldview. The complexity isn't there; the comfortingly empty symbols and upbeat music are. They exist to be bought and sold relative to private companies that own everything.

Furthermore, these positions can be constantly returned to through retro content. Streets of Rage 4 (2020) "returns" to the original Rage mindset, reliving former glory through the dated promise of cleaning up the streets. Formerly a '50s pastoral reward accomplished through defensive action, retro nostalgia is little more than a vague, recycled promise. Rather than encourage critical thought, it becomes something to recreate, sell, and enjoy. Like a cheeseburger.

Despite being deliberately simple, these ideas still have the power to effect reality. Not just Mr. X from Streets of Rage. America's enemies during the Cold War were likewise intimated by the likes of Dr. Cossack, Zangief, and Red Falcon. This kind of harmful simplifications dumbs down consumer minds at an early age, reinforcing a black-and-white worldview that is not only woefully basic, but told entirely through neutral, floating signifiers. The complexities of power on the global stage are reduced to dumb, Saturday morning theatrics. 

This wasn't just a problem back in the '80s. Streets of Rage 4 is guilty of the same oversimplification by spinning individuals of various colors and creeds into identical copies of themselves. The player either fights these replicas one at a time, or as a phalanx of shields and clubs. Despite being presented as floating symbols within a vacuum, the proliferate cops and robbers represent arrangements that are quite real:

• Thugs, enemies of the state. The state needs criminals to justify its own use of force against civilians.
• Cops, employees of the state. The state needs cops to use force against its subjects.

Of course, 4 presents cops as misunderstood or inept, with "good" cops firing a bazooka for the player's benefit, while "misguided" cops like Estel gradually come around through cutscenes (eventually being unlocked as a playable character in the game's DLC, "Mr. X's Nightmares").

The state, here, is effectively rehabilitated through a neutral framework where everyone is fighting everyone, Enter the Dragon-style. Nevertheless, historical abuses perpetrated by the state are swept under the lie that "Cops aren't the bad guys! They don't fight dirty." Of course they do. Meanwhile, women and men are portrayed in grossly stereotypical ways; so are queer people, the poor, and ethnic minorities. The '80s wasn't particular kind to any of these individuals:

• Gay Panic and the AIDS crisis
• the war on crime, drugs
• dismantling welfare and unions

Instead, the game's "real enemy" is the aristocracy of an older time, represented by two fraternal twins living on a Gothic island. Compared to them, the state is invisible, the parade of cops lost in the shuffle of ninja mercenaries and killer robots. Then again, the renegade reskins simply mirror their civilized variants, adumbrating a troubling connection between the two: The game's ultimate villain and neutral parties are merely two forms of power competing for dominance.

This troubling fact can be disguised not merely through a neutral framework, but a nostalgic one. I'll explore this idea more, next.

Nostalgia and Allegory

This section will explore nostalgia and allegory as connected to the '80s hero: 

• Nostalgia is the emotion of or longing for the past as connected with home.
• Allegory is the hidden meaning of a text. This can be what is contained inside the text, omitted from it, or obscured by it.

Let's start with nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a tremendous selling point in the current market. However, while vintage nostalgia was produced by giant companies, retro nostalgia is produced those seeking to emulate the mass media of a former time. This can allow for the insertion of new ideas within a tried-and-true formula; it can also reinforce the same problems outlined in the previous section.

So while nostalgia can be a consciously informed choice, it becomes incredibly problematic when it isn’t. Those following the formula more faithfully avoid anything that might compromise their collective vision of the past. Effectively it's a form of regression—of seeing the world as being generally and exclusively marketed to them. These can be enjoyed, much in the way a WWF fan might beat their chest and cry, "Hulkamania's runnin' wild, brother!" While entertainment doesn't exist in a vacuum, lone fans are further isolated by remediation. A proliferation of replicas reinforce power as "neutral" by surrounding the player with nothing else. This allows dated, conservative viewpoints to continually return to the fore. 

For example, Generation Z never saw Hulk Hogan in his heyday. Max returns in Streets of Rage 4 as a copy of the Hulkster. Uncertainty in the present can also push young fans in nostalgic directions, hence producing a desire to return to an era when "things were better." Except they weren't: Hulk Hogan is an extremely sexist, racist man. Even when things were demonstrably awful, these demonstrations occur outside of nostalgic media's neutral veneer. Said veneer discourages critical thought in favor of dumb, happy customers. Max evokes the fictional '80s through Hogan tagline, while conveniently omitting his racism.

There can still be allegory. It just has to compete with those who are geared to interpret media according to basic, easily recognizable signs:

• a muscular hero
• a damsel in distress
• a hammy villain
• henchmen
• a larger, vague crisis

Forget Hogan. According to these consumers even a more politically informed hero like Snake Plisskin can be celebrated for his muscles, not his skepticism. He's not fighting the state; he's badass. These interpretive challenges only persist as those in power seek to valorize skeptical heroes post hoc. 

Some heroes are already primed to be celebrated. While Snake was manufactured through a cynical mind operating independently from the larger scheme, a seemingly earnest parody like Predator most certainly was not. Predator stars men following the Hogan model. Schwarzenegger and company were large, cocky men whose muscles overshadowed by their flaws. And to a certain extent I can sit down and enjoy Predator (1987) for how easily it lends itself to hyperbole. 

However, it also matches propaganda of the mythical hero as beset by evil, a notion exploited by those in power to shape the minds of their subjects through incredible stories. Whether they realize it or not, many people were influenced to varying degrees by these monumental men and their mythical deeds. Predator illustrates how these heroes needn't be hygienic for this to occur. Its characters are crass stereotypes with crude dialogue: 

• Blain (to everyone): "Buncha slack-jawed faggots around here! This stuff'll make you into a goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus—just like me!"

The sexual tyrannosaurus is the greatest dinosaur that never lived; Blain's faith in his chewing tobacco pure nonsense. It's also a kind of raw posturing that some people will undeniably respect (the character was played by Jessie Ventura, a WWF wrestler like Hogan). To this, Predator is not a hostile parody that rejects every aspect of a particular piece of media; it has fun with the material, endorsing it through tongue-in-cheek means.

Predator operates on a fairly small scale, set in the jungles of Venezuela. Some stories are much larger in scope. For example, Rocky 4 has Rocky beating the Soviet's greatest hero, Drago, inside the boxing ring, thereby "winning" the Cold War. This ludicrous notion will make perfect sense to the '80s action fan; their favorite adventures use nostalgia to mythologize the hero as forever invulnerable and righteous—a champion of good that can rescue anyone from any situation (a play taken from Reagan, himself a Hollywood actor). 

Streets of Rage 4 combines Predator's rowdy posturing with Rocky's savior complex. In Streets of Rage, there's no one to even save, just the player stomping a conveyer belt of foes. This omission of allegory transforms these fictional stories into something unto themselves. And while they seem disconnected from reality, this isolationism is actually a way of seeing the world. No matter how absurd Streets of Rage is, its heroic positions are draped in precious nostalgia taken from vintage works. 

Allegory and nostalgia are often at odds. And yet, while devoted fans guard canon for its nostalgic value, the uninitiated can generate allegory merely by comparing these disjointed stories to their immediate, real-world surroundings. 

For example, the flag-waving bravado of Rocky 4 promotes the liberal axiom that freedom should be defended at all costs. Meanwhile, those living in Cuba or Latin America sit squarely outside Reagan's lofty (and bogus) vision of the so-called "free world." Thus, they might not appreciate Rocky's homegrown defense of freedom, as it geopolitically translates to sanctions against them. 

Allegory is a revealing of the hidden that invites punishment. As Gamergate (2014) illustrated, fans of '80s nostalgia can be downright hostile towards the allegory-prone. These fans not only view the world through nostalgia-tinted glasses; they will attack those who refuse to wear them by criticizing the fan's worldview. Often, this world view is literally the game itself—how it presents men and women, and how politics is mercifully scrubbed from the narrative. 

A movie like They Live illustrates this concept well, albeit in reverse. When Roddy Piper finds a pair of magic glasses, he can see through the superficial glass of pure consumerism. The ads are lies and the rich are monsters. When Roddy tells his friend to wear the glasses, the other man attacks him. What follows is a stupidly violent brawl, the two men trouncing each other for five minutes straight.

Fans of violence love this scene. They also miss the point: 

• Roddy and Keith are both conditioned by society to fight.
• Keith, being uninitiated, will use this ability to violently reject the truth behind society. 

Fans of '80s violence will mistakenly interpret the fight as Carpenter pandering to them. The violence in Streets of Rage is treated much the same way. If there's anything else going on, it gets lost in the scuffle.

Creative intent is always a matter of debate; the role of the '80s action hero is far less ambiguous. The '80s hero is a cop and a superman. So are the heroes from Streets of Rage. Not only do they glorify violence; they uphold it as part of the status quo. Prized for this reason, fans will attack critics who seek to devalue their favorite action heroes by exposing their flaws. According to Ghassan Hage, society can be viewed as a mechanism that administers hope to its citizens. To attack heroes is to thus attack hope (aka the War on Christmas defense).

In political terms, excessive hope is often a lie; Reagan and Margaret Thatcher banked on hope to get elected, then wrote polices demonstrably harming their voters. In media, superheroes are lies told by the state (or de facto extensions of the state) through hopeful personas. These frame violence as normal, thus invisible. Any of the heroes we've discussed up to this point, including those from Streets of Rage, were cops-in-disguise: They offered hope in one hand, and unspeakable violence in the other.

Cops-in-Disguise

Not all '80s action heroes are literal cops like Axel Stone. The majority of them function as paragons of morality and strength, or at least strength. In turn, their fans not only defend them; they defend their real-world counterparts. As real cops patrol the streets, they are enabled by citizens uncritical of and hungry for '80s action nostalgia. These fans compare policemen to the benevolent, mighty warriors they love so much on TV.

"Videogames make people violent!" is not a new argument. However, exposure to violent, heroic policemen at a young age ups the odds that people will adopt violent worldviews. This worldview includes the normalizing of violence perpetrated against others by agents of the state. Neutral frameworks, though especially movies and videogames, introduce this paradigm at an early age, and build on it as something to franchise.  

Streets of Rage is fairly basic from a ludonarrative standpoint, but some videogames have evolved and expanded more noticeably.

For example, Mega Man was originally marketed to children. As time went on, he aged alongside his target audience, becoming the increasingly militant X (whose blue-and-red color scheme is not unlike a policer cruiser, or the robotic HKs from The Terminator). X became someone to look up to and admire not simply for being strong, but for being part of an organization that reliably punishes evil. This organization, much like Samus Aran and the Galactic Federation, drew slowly into focus. X first followed Zero. Then Dr. Cain appeared, followed by Cain's Maverick Hunters and their necessary foils: Colonel and Repliforce. 

As a maverick hunter, X hunts dissident reploids. The argument, however weak, is that X brings them to justice. But X always kills his victims. The alternate scenario is so rare that me seeing it in the fangame Mega Man X: Corruption (TBA) actually took me by surprise. Thus, the Mega Man series not only evolved to become more and more violent; it did so in a military sense spelled out in clear language. And despite the frankly terrible voice-acting and increasingly convoluted plot, the X franchise is beloved and defended by many.

This tactic is not unique to Mega Man. Heroic media more generally will tie extreme violence to policing and war (re: Contra, Raiden). In turn, a consumer's most exciting childhood memories are invariably wed to these issues. Instead of compulsory education, the media industry advertises police violence to children. This violence is normalized, packed as family friendly entertainment sold everywhere. It's presented as harmless fun (meanwhile, the awesome power of these war machines are espoused to equally awesome illusions that place them in the hands of children—youngsters trained to fight to the death against any ultimate imaginary foe while humming to the nostalgic music).

American developers in particular love to target key demographics with violent stereotypes. Doom, for example, normalizes righteous gun violence: Demons are bad; shoot them. The franchise caters to aging consumers with this unspoken mantra, maintaining a decades-old fandom that loves guns. Streets of Rage takes the same approach with fisticuffs: Criminals are bad; beat them up. Those of its fans who favor police "doing their jobs" only having these biases reinforced by a videogame recreation of excessive force.

Fandoms are, by their very nature, isolating. Sometimes, a person's sense of worth can become hopelessly tied to a group that gives them no alternative. This stems from ideas that were introduced to consumers once, and then repeatedly sold back to them. The idea becomes an identity ("we are gamers") that consumers will defend with mounting aggression. They'll routinely

• make blind purchases
• react negatively to anything that conflicts with their narrow worldview (re: Gamergate)
• grow accustomed to committing or condoning violence against their enemies

Regarding this third point, in-game demons parallel real-world recipients of police violence, which is to say, lethal violence. This makes videogames a form of propaganda, a concept we'll explore next.

Propaganda

Pro-policing is the worst consequence stemming from '80s nostalgia, one whose propaganda manipulates the audience into adapting a cop's mindset. There are two variants: militarized and domestic.

• Militarized propaganda. The myth of invincibility is cultivated by the state operating as war machine through its population. 
• Domestic propaganda. The myth is cultivated through media sold to civilians who support domestic extensions of state control: the police.

A famous example of militarized propaganda is Nazi Germany. Through nonstop propaganda, Hitler's Germany promoted mythic, invincible strength as entitled. While the Soviet's favored brute-force party control and active censorship, the Nazi state chose to manipulate the public through more lateral methods. Despite being tied to a cult of personality that hijacked a decentralized bureaucracy and encouraged competing bodies within, Hitler's propaganda threw its "heroes," the citizenry, at whatever enemy the state invented. This promise of power was effectively a con, one leadership eventually bought into. Hitler may have lied and cheated his way to power, but was nonetheless digging his own grave. Actual belief is beside the point when the mythology Hitler used led to his kingdom's total destruction. 

Domestic propaganda is equally harmful, but less aggressive. In Propaganda (1928), American writer Edward Bernays proposed that wealth and advertising allowed for the creation of "invisible people" that controlled the hearts and minds of the public—a monopoly of engineered consent that, in his mind, was vital to the survival of democracy. Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (1988) would outline these invisibles as the corporate groups that media groups are beholden to through advertisers. Such an invisible group is much like the one Carpenter commented in They Live, which came out the same year as Chomsky's book. 

Unfortunately this group are perfectly comfortable with the proliferation of war. War is profitable. To cozen their way into the minds of the public, American corporations in the '90s used neutral media like Streets of Rage to advertise pro-military and pro-state sentiments. Like Reagan before him, Bush Sr. targeted his population with family-friendly entertainment that repeatedly paralleled U.S. policy as "good." In turn, these franchises grew popular thanks to their magnetic, simple heroes (which, at the domestic level, represented police groups Keeping America Safe). 

These heroes became something not unlike Hitler's propaganda, or the alt-right groups that emulated Hitler in the US: They offered what Healing from Hate (2019) refers to as "false power," or the the feeling of strength (timestamp: 24:30), to those who felt weak. Often, this weakness stems from the tremendous expectations society places on men through their heroic standards. People often play videogames to feel empowered; but videogames like Streets of Rage empower through propaganda disguised as neutral entertainment, specifically cathartic violence. The resulting worldviews (and the fandoms encouraging and protecting them) illustrate a territorial attitude to the whole affair. 

Consequently the fandom as "under attack" is also common feeling for nostalgic viewpoints that present the world in simple, violent terms. When threatened, these points of view will not sit idly by, but rather will defend themselves viciously, as they've been taught. Streets of Rage teaches the application of force through the need to punish others a priori. On par with the Power Ranger's "teenagers with attitude," the youthful defenders are strong enough to fight, and taught into thinking they're invincible—or at least impervious enough, through tacit support from the state, to embark on a crusade. 

Unfortunately this soldier's mentality overlooks the material reality of the situation: 

• Those under attack by the hero have nothing.
• The relatively wealthy hero is made to think they are under attack by the criminals.
• The hero is doing the state's bidding by sweeping the streets in coordination with the police.

Each mission is part of a violent, player-led campaign into impoverished levels like "Dilapidated Town." There, the local population is entirely criminal (a fact illustrated by the hero beating everyone up). The player seems autonomous, literally holding a controller in their hands; the game still conditions them to "win" by beating up bad guys that just happen to be marginalized. 

This is profoundly manipulative. Streets of Rage is not teenage rebellion against the state, but the state recruiting the middle class—specifically their angry youth—to police those most likely to rebel. This harsh treatment of the fictional poor mirrors bipartisan sentiments about the actual poor. Any anger or mistrust of the poor stems less from actual abuses committed against the player, and more from advertisements that manipulate player emotions. 

Being slightly better off, the player is either keenly aware of actual socioeconomic problems (re: unemployment, economic instability and the shortage of material goods, etc) or told of them through videogames than present things in simple, black-and-white language. In either case, these overbearing issues are replaced by repeated promises: Things could get worse. 

By making this promise in-game, Streets of Rage primes its target audience to recognize and respect pugilistic displays of strength. Heroes not only matter, they are the only solution. As heroes are essentialized as the arbiters of Justice, their repeated shows of force replace more peaceful methods. Worse, fans recognize these violent displays in the police they see as heroic (who generally frame themselves as heroic, too). 

Reap the Whirlwind

'80s heroic media encourages police heroism, and curries favor with the public by framing cops as human. Axel, Blaze and Adam are deliberate stand-ins for real cops, their noble pledges shared through a common goal. This parallel aims to convince the public that cops are morally just, regardless of the violence they commit. In turn, the public will fight the police's political battles for them by turning a blind eye towards police abuse. Better solutions will be abandoned in favor of excessive violence. 

The problem is, police violence historically makes things worse. As the excuse to use excessive force becomes standard, so does any rhetoric defending it post hoc. Either the officer describes themselves as having feared for their lives, or the citizens around them do. In either case, there is no accountability from the arm of the state should the cop decide to use lethal force. Its unhappy recipients are left increasingly naked before power: 

• Everyone is a victim.
• The rights of the victim are rescinded in favor of the state as holder of all rights, including the right to live or die.  
• There are no victims because the state can never be wrong. 
• The criminal deserves everything coming to them. 

Defense of police violence is the defense of popular media that sells police heroism as a positive. Specifically the '80s hero fosters a kind of warrior mentality through simple "us-versus-them" thinking. In doing so, it refuses to hold the police accountable. It does this by presenting them as human—i.e., they're just like us, and subject to the same laws. 

This is a myth. Just as Axel and company are above the law, real-world police cannot be prosecuted, not even for murder. They have to be fired first, then prosecuted as civilians. Not only the institution will protect itself by rehiring disgraced cops, but also framing the public as a constant threat. The citizenry that becomes the Enemy has the potential to become a criminal at the drop of a hat, even the privileged: 

• A cop can legally kill someone in front of you.
• It's illegal for you to physically interfere.

The problem is, police abuses do not systemically effect white people in the racist sense. Instead, American media repeatedly treats the police as neutral, incapable of acting in violent self-interest. Only crooked cops are violent, but they're also framed as cartoon characters (re: the Commissioner from Streets of Rage 4, a not-so-subtle nod to Batman). They become exceptions to the rule, the tacit argument made by neutral media that such persons are exceedingly rare, even mythical. 

This same media targets white audiences by painting them as the benefactors of police protection. Insulated by these lies, white audiences cannot see real police abuse. They become less likely to rock the boat; they support those in power, including their idealized, fictional counterparts. Cops are cool, especially cops that are poorly disguised as iconic superheroes, of superheroes, of superheroes. 

Remediation is a factor in violent education as continual. Similar to Hitler's decentralized government, the imagery is not explicitly produced by anyone group as "calling the shots." Rather the conspiracy exists and operate in a complex and ongoingly organic hive: These heroes are franchised; the owners of these franchises are in cahoots with politicians and elected officials; and the combined message of each group benefits the other through the reliable generation of wealth. This wealth comes by manipulating the middle class into buying more heroes—their games, movies and action figures, and mashups of any and all of these things. What is Axel from Streets of Rage 4 if not Johnny the blonde-haired bully from Karate Kid aged thirty years? If this sounds familiar, it should; it's the plot to Cobra Kai (2018).

This heroic proliferation only increases the odds that children will be exposed to heroic, violent ideologies, which are incrementally franchised over time. In turn, these children will see their heroes as normal and harmless, but also vital. Heroic violence becomes a cartoon, but also a facsimile of real world politics endorsed through various products being bought and sold, over and over. 

The Solution (for Starters)

I want to offer some solutions that combat police heroism. Bear in mind, this issue is incredibly complex; cops start as civilians who were bred on religion or secular media that glorifies the badge. In other words, the real world is informed by fictional media. So I will provide solutions that address both components.

Let's start with real-world stuff. Police have far more power than they like to let on. Doing so would present them as threatening to the public (similar to the SS-Totenkopfverbände that many people associate with state tyranny thanks to mass media). This leaves planned resistance with two basic options: 

• Criminal action, or actively fighting the law. This includes rioting (attacking property) and peaceful protests. 
• Education, or exposing the law's flaws. This includes teaching history that isn't white-washed, investigative journalism, and publicizing current events that concern abuses of power (those who commit, and those who cover).

Although certain crimes are more clear-cut, those in power use "criminality" as a label against marginalized groups (re: the War on Drugs). Rioting goes directly against the interests of the rich, but so does peaceful protesting. Thus, the rich will criminalize the right to assemble and protest whenever and wherever they can. If the poor and educated protest, they can be met with violence and quelled like any rebellion (re: the Kent State shootings). As a final precautionary measure taken by law enforcement, the conflation of riots and peaceful resistance will encourage the population to effectively police themselves by rooting out the law's enemies. 

As illustrated by the Civil Right's Movement, criminal action was necessary for change to occur. Riots are a valuable tool of the poor, as they can expose abuse by threatening the property of the powerful. As the powerful respond, the priviliged (middle class) can watch the rich use police to attack rioters inhumanely. This can cause the middle class to pressure representatives into enforcing changes that go against the interests of the rich.

However, the middle class will be disinclined to commit crimes that threaten their privilige. For them, education becomes an attractive venue: Convince the public that cops do more harm than good, thus incentivize their eventual defunding and dismissal.

Regarding fictional media, the solution starts with recognizing the threats that media poses when blindly consumed, including the heroes within as "innocent" role models and incorruptible paragons. Yes, action heroes can provide meaningful experiences to our lives. I wouldn't deprive my younger self of that. I also wouldn't choose to readopt a position of ignorance, either. 

Thinking critically doesn't preclude enjoyment, any more than emotionally understanding one's romantic partner makes the ensuing relationship less healthy. Increased awareness might seem like Coleridge's "sad and wiser man." But ignorance regarding the state only makes it easier for the state to manipulate and abuse their victims. Only those who aren't an immediate target would opt to look the other way.

For me, it's less what the symbols are, and more how we respond to them. Rather than treating each as a single dot, I connect the dots by recognizing them as state machinations (of the American sort) pushed through entertainment in ways that reliably produce what the state wants: money and influence. In doing so, I can see the advertisement as part of a larger scheme. 

I also can play with the material. Instead of blindly purchasing the product, and another and another, I can toy with the purchase as something to study and learn from. It can be things like

• watching speedrunners dissect Streets of Rage 4
• consciously treating the performance of my own gameplay as something pointedly separate from the default politics of the developers and their intended audience

This intentional and skilled playfulness is very different than enforcing the performance and its symbols as completely neutral, as blind consumers so often do; it lets me foster a kind of awareness that I can write about, as I'm doing now. This book educates those who come after me, teaching them to be critical of media, but also letting them appreciate the broken symbols as things to enjoy for idiosyncratic purposes—a reclaiming of the ability to play as something that encourages thought disentangled from the Jacob's Ladder of state control. 

The role of the iconoclast isn't to beat the hero into pieces, but to make those worshipping him lose interest by gradually exposing his flaws. These flaws include systems that capitalize on the hero as an effective, thus profitable, propaganda tool. Over time, consumers can stop seeing these heroes as the end all, be all of fun and their worldviews. Unshackled from them, the player can exchange this relationship for something healthier, but just as robust. I did not crumble to dust in seeing my childhood heroes as problematic; I learned to appreciate what fun remains when playing Streets of Rage 4 myself, or watching others do so in my stead.

A Caveat

These solutions, like a street fight, are inherently messy. We grow up with this material, and are taught to to defend it, critics be damned. But even if we're open to interpretation, but the outcome is seldom simple. 

Take, for example, Dragon's Crown (2013). Unlike Streets of Rage, I didn't grow up with Atlus' beat-em-up; I played the game when I was older. While I could immediately recognize its dated views of men and women, I was nonetheless raised on Frazetta, the game's obvious inspiration. Interpreting what I saw could have gone many different ways, but this is what I arrived at:

Dragon's Crown is as much as a parody of Frazetta's style as it is a straight endorsement. The frenetic visuals and sexual caricatures contrast comically with the straight-faced narrative voice. So while it's largely exploitative, Dragon's Crown allows the heavy-chested heroine or fat-bottomed girl to seize the day in spectacular fashion. And if Dragon's Crown seems a bit of a wide target due to its obviously sexual material, recall that sexist media enforces sexuality as "strength." Dragon's Crown's isn't above doing so, but its heroines are obviously pin-up models. There's an awareness to the role that doesn't try to like to the audience. 

The same open-minded honesty should be applied when examining heroes like Axel Stone. If there's room for the audience to interpret things for themselves, that's one thing. But even in the lack of explicit politics, the default position—of a muscle-bound equalizer leveling all comers through unbiased violence—needs to be acknowledged as being part of a larger trend. In Streets of Rage's case, the franchise has spent the last thirty years advertising political violence to consumers. To suggest otherwise would be disingenuous or naïve.

Often, strength and sexual control merge through commercial tastes aimed at ideal consumers. These persons have been groomed over time to endorse the status quo, usually since birth. If this is true, can heroes even be used to benefit those not on the side of power? 

We'll explore this idea next, in part 2.

Part 2: Room for Heroes?

Now that we've discussed the hero's role as a policemen, this section will examine how the body of the hero is constructed to represents standard heroic values more generally. To that, we'll explore how these standards are inherently racist and sexist.

The remainder of this section consists of the following sub-sections:

• The Problem with Brawn
• People of Color
• Soft Boys and Hard Women
• Sexual Control

The Problem of Brawn

This section explores the problem of brawn as an essential heroic ingredient, and how this has sexist and racist components. 

It's not just that brawn and heroic bodies go hand-in-hand. The generalized policing of bodies is vital to preserving traditional ideas of strength as a whole. However, because actual bodies, ethnicities, and genders are incredibly diverse, the state's demand for a simple binary is not so easy to achieve. Barring official segregation or unofficial "redlining," any comics, cartoons and action figures will be compared not just to citizens from all walks, but athletes of various body types.

We'll explore this more in the "People of Color" sub-section. For now, just remember that traditional values are enforced through an ideological binary, one where Strength is not only masculine, but essentially male. Yes, the bodies allowed in heroic roles are afforded some leeway provided these exceptions tow the line. More often than not, though, certain bodies are preferred: strong, white male bodies, livingly chiseled from stone.

Preferential treatment isn't just a male problem. Despite being the antithesis to brawn in traditional schemes, woman have it even worse. Women's bodies are twisted to horrible, bone-breaking extremes (re: the Hawkeye Initiative); involuntary nudity is commonplace (re: "There's no underwear in space!"). 

And so often, life imitates art. At the very least, women are expected to appear like their idealized selves. While men enjoy much less control overall, their heroic standards are no less constructed. In particular, male bodies are sculpted like so much clay. The skill of the artist is unfortunately secondary to the creation of an impossible ideal. Thus, the more ridiculous the body, the more its celebrated as "true strength." Hence why Rob Liefeld was a top-paid artist, and remains celebrated in the 21st century. Accuracy is obviously not the point:

I'm not against muscles, including violent muscles; I'm an erotic artist who, again, felt in love with the likes of Frazetta, Vallejo and Royo. I can appreciate

• Artistic liberties. A bit of leeway can be fun. I also empathize with the plight of the artist who, armed with obvious anatomical knowledge, is forced to exclusively cater to the demand for unreal bodies (re: Sakimi Chan's tutorials versus their creative output).
• Physical specimens. Human bodies are fascinating to study. Muscles are incredibly complex in and of themselves, but become even more complex when combined with the skeleton, flesh and pose.
• Historical artifacts. The fact—that the depiction of strength belongs to a particular time period where violent theater was not only common, but embraced—merits its own field of study. At the very least, this can be something to emulate or try in own's art.

The problem is, these devices have historically been used in fascist terms. There are two basic steps:

• Strength is a position that was originally lost. 
• A return to this position is usher in by individuals who personify particular traditional values through their statuesque qualities.

Oliver Harper's documentary In Search of the Last Action Heroes (2019) illustrates step one by treating the '80s action hero as belonging to a lost generation, a "better" generation. Any one of those heroes can complete part two.

Batman, for example, is a "knight" idealized for his raw strength and endless resources. Presumably he punishes those the state won't; in reality he reinforces state power through maintenance of the status quo. And he embodies this status through his own statuesque physique. Its no coincidence that real-life bodybuilders often call themselves warriors. No only do they compare themselves to Batman or any other figure that personifies strength through a perfected, albeit subjective image; they frequently endorse the police as a real-world extension of strength. 

Vigilante fantasies are not exclusive to Batman, bodybuilders, or cops. In Streets of Rage, the protagonist Axel Stone is revered for consolidating strength around a male symbol*. He and other powerful-looking men promote qualities that are afforded to men by virtue of them simply being men. Romanticized and revered, their position is recognized, celebrated, and defended. 

*Or, more to the point, a male ideology. As a female vigilante, Blaze Fielding is part of the crime-fighting trio; her "power" was still crafted by heterosexual men who sexually control women into a particular "type." In this regard, she's basically no different than Tifa Lockhart. Her "power" stems from how big her breasts are. And if you think that sounds strange, try this exercise:

• Imagine Blaze looking as burly and tough as Axel, and Axel as soft and sexy as Blaze. It seems ridiculous within the game because Streets of Rage 4 forces all men to look like Axel, and all women to look like Blaze. The one exception is Estel, the game's second boss. We'll explore this idea more in the "Soft boys and Hard Women" sub-section.

Characters like Axel Stone don't require personalities, just incredible bodies that real-life fans can worship. They embody strength, which, in turn, becomes a kind of political currency, thus protection. 

Similarly, real-life bodybuilders enjoy their own level of protection from fans. Shawn Roden, for example, is currently undergoing a rape investigation. But don't be surprised to hear his biggest fans clamoring for his participation in athletic events. This isn't clemency. These people declare his innocence while routinely blaming the victim. They do so for monetary reasons, but also because they want to emulate Roden's hero status—i.e., the sense of entitlement and privilege that Roden seemingly earned through hard work. 

In reality these qualities are merely part of the status quo. Muscles are expensive to cultivate; requiring valuable sponsorships, they become a status symbol only the wealthy can afford. Not to put to hard a point on it, but these bodybuilders wear their muscles like clothes; fans admire these "clothes," but also their abundant political capital, prestige, and seemingly infallible* glamor.

*Despite the obvious and numerous health concerns facing bodybuilders, people chase the glory such a body can provide in traditional circles.

The idea—what Strength is supposed to look like at all—is not transcendental. And yet, it's not uncommon to hear fans talk about genetic superiority, drawing a hard line in favor of natural genetics and pedigree over hard work. Simply put, those who win are essentialized as victors through a sense of pre-selection: They were chosen by the gods to be strong, and to represent strength in the realms of mere mortal men. 

The problem remains, that the appearance of strength is supplied through nebulous and competing subjective notions. Thus, a male body can be valued for being a bodybuilder, or a cartoon crime fighter. Either presents the male body as lionized through the same overarching principle: Strength stems from the male body. Man is masculine. 

Axel and the four other male heroes in Streets of Rage 4 represent this bias as part of an idealized performance. There is no room for other types of bodies to perform, or gender performances that depict strength as something other than sheer, brute muscle.

We'll explore those alternatives in the "Soft Boys and Hard Women" sub-section. But first, let's examine people of color and their role in the traditional heroic scheme.

People of Color

Streets of Rage 4 has three people of color: Cherry, Adam and Floyd. Cherry is softer and more abstract in her fighting style. Her body is soft; her weapon is a guitar that never breaks. Adam and Floyd fight like traditional athletes, relying on strength and technique to carry the day. These are not graceful men. They're hard-hitting sluggers. 

The black athlete as "warrior" is not an uncommon stereotype. In Get Out (2017), Chris Washington, the movie's black hero, is having dinner with his white girlfriend's family. Things go from polite to awkward when her brother assumes that Chris is "into sports." Chris admits he plays basketball. From there, the brother argues that Chris must better at being violent with his body. Simply put, he's a beast.

Though hardly a sports game, Streets of Rage 4 deliberately presents Adam and Floyd as physically impressive pugilists. While Adam is statuesque, Floyd is a complete and utter hulk. He's so strong that he can pick two men up—one in either arm—and literally slam them together. Meanwhile, the black men they assault are equally muscular (especially the ubiquitous Donovan clones).

This babyface/heel dynamic can be seen in any sport where black athletes are expected to be violent. African American boxing heroes like Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali, Ken Norton and Mike Tyson all fell quite neatly into the babyface/heel binary. Liston was a perpetual villain* (see: Rainy Day Boxing), whereas Louis, according to Joe Vincent, was “The Real Captain America.” 

*This didn't stop Liston from wanting respect, but his criminal history, imposing physique and brutal persona denied him that repeatedly. All of these factors were arguably the fault of systemic racism in the United States, including the depiction of Liston as a monster by the white press. But the sport, by design, also needed a villain, to which the black man was the perfect candidate in their racist eyes.

All of these men were prized athletes operating in a bloodsport that capitalized on racial tensions. More than this, they embodied these tensions through stereotypical physiques. Liston had the body of a villain: a burly figure with a soul-crushing scowl (one adopted by George Foreman for much the same reasons). Ken Norton, aka "the Black Hercules," broke the jaw of the Greatest, Ali; he had a body that screamed hero. 

This type of heroic body language is all too common for people of color in the Western boxing narrative. However, it can also be readily seen in Streets of Rage 4 with Adam, Donovan and Floyd. All are violent black men, and only differ in how their violence explodes against others.

The bodies mentioned so far have largely been statuesque, sculpted. I'd like to explore some examples where the roles of men and women are reversed.

Soft Boys and Hard Women

Gill Saunders observes how classical art creates sexual difference by "defining sexuality in terms of opposites" (The Nude: a New Perspective, 1989). It features men as masculine, having hard, strong bodies; woman are feminine, having soft, weak bodies. Strength is essentially male; weakness (aka "vulnerability") is essentially female.

In heroic media, this body language is incredibly common. However, in gendered terms you need only reverse these qualities to break the system:

• Hard women have hard, masculine bodies. The most famous example is the Amazon.
• Soft boys have soft, feminine bodies. This includes twinks, but also femboys and catboys.

Women who are muscular are seen as impostors or monsters in traditional art (or so-called "heroic" art that champions traditional values); soft-bodied men are either impotent, or monsters that destroy the binary that places heterosexual men at the top. 

We'll explore these categories more deeply in just a moment. First, let's examine them as they appear in Streets of Rage 4. 

In the "Problem of Brawn" sub-section I invited the reader to try and reverse the gender roles of Axel Stone and Blaze Fielding. It largely doesn't work because Streets of Rage 4's nostaglic framework is informed by the '80s status quo. Men like Axel, the Commissioner and Max are stupidly tough beefcakes with rigid, stiff movements; women like Blaze, Mrs. Y and and Nora are curvy and soft, with liquid-smooth attacks. 

The game's alternate body types are strictly villainized. Estel is the game's token hard woman, an Amazon for the player to fight and defeat. Mr. Y is the game's soft boy, an effeminate salary man with a penchant for Uzis instead of muscles. Their defeat at the hands of the hero is demonstrative: Know your place. Even so, the hero has to fight to enforce their position. 

Despite being carved from rock, strength is hardly set in stone. Rather, traditional men covet their strength as an essential fabrication to their mythical power. Traditional men rely on strength as built from lies that men are superior. Thus, they feel more threatened than anyone else by conflicting personas. This marks the proliferation of soft boys and hard women as dangerous, but also curious. 

Let's start with hard women, specifically Amazons. Amazons are generally martial women with masculine, "armored" bodies. In other words, they might wear some actual armor, but their muscles fulfil the same role. Examples include the Amazon from Dragon's Crown, but also Teela from He-Man: Revelations. These characters look physically strong but remain undeniably female.

Because the Amazon is a female role, its power is often checked in some shape or form. The Amazon from Dragon's Crown is sexualized for the sake of men; her abs are hard, her ass is big and soft. And Teela—despite being Revelations' ambiguously gay protagonist—spends much of the show failing the Bechdel Test. Revelations fixates on two absent patriarchs, albeit from a female point of view.

To his credit, Kevin Smith is more progressive than some. He grants Teela a degree of autonomy as the uncertain tomboy. As captain of the guard, she also proves the traditionalist argument true—that women with hard bodies functionally emulate men, specifically policemen (re: Estel). Yes, Teela abandons this position early on; she eventually embraces it by not questioning her position as someone "destined for greatness."

These criticisms of the Amazon are not uncommon, and the figure remains historically tied up in war. Still, I have to wonder what arguments '80s action fans would pose against men who deliberately have soft bodies, feminine outfits, and non-warrior personas. 

These soft boys include the femboy and catboy. 

• Femboys arguably stem from the bishonen, or "pretty boy" genre, of Japanese anime, but are far less marital. In fact, Japan has a long history of complex gender expression compared to the West. This tradition has survived Western occupation, as seen in Japanese queer cinema like Funeral Parade of Roses (1969). However, it's also an approach to feminizing hypermasculine men, like so (NSFW link).
• Catboys operate in the neko tradition, wearing cat ears and cat tails. There are warrior variants, but even these are sleekly feminine and conspicuously unthreatening (at least on social media). Neko is also Japanese slang for "bottom" in a homosexual relationship.

Streets of Rage has neither. Maybe it's because their distinct lack of muscles and scruff goes against the '80s action hero persona. But if catboys did exist in Streets of Rage 4, what would they look like?

Look no further than Thundercats (1985). As yet another return to strength through the family-friendly model, Thundercats abjured the image of the friendly housecat for the fearsome (and posturing) persona of the lion: Lion-O was basically a muscle man wearing contacts; there was almost nothing cat-like about him or his friends. They have no ears and no tails. They were aimed at children with catchy music and exciting action.

The Streets of Rage 4 hypothetical would invariably followed the same Western ideal: The catboys would become beefy catmen, and the women would become catgirl sexpots (catwoman is historically monstrous; i.e., Cat-women of the Moon, 1953, or the infamous femme fatale from the Batman comics, 1940). '80s Americana allows for nothing else. 

This includes femboys. The American action hero from the '80s was almost universally not boyish. Hence, the closest thing in Streets of Rage 4 is Shiva, whose boyish brawn emulates '80s bishonen. While it's true that many Japanese exports were simply shonen (re: Voltron, 1984; and Robotech, 1985), bishonen was exported to America through Japanese sentai cartoons like Legendary Armor Samurai Troopers (1988). As these shows were translated directly into English, they retained their feminine male heroes. 

In this sense, femininity is not just an American import; it's policed and controlled once on American shores, inside American games. 

Sexual Control

The policing of American heroes includes the policing of sex through art. The hand-drawn art in Streets of Rage constantly depicts sexual control. As such, these idealized bodies-in-motion are guilty of many double standards. 

For example, masculine nudity isn't nude at all; it's a kind of armor the male action hero can flaunt with abandon, rendering them invincible. Meanwhile, "feminine" translates to female, or vulnerable nudity—i.e., strictly sexual displays. Female nudity is controlled, thus censored. This kind of control grants the male hero consider freedom. 

Consider Urien from Street Fighter III: Third Strike. While he cannot show his penis and balls, the rest of his body is fair game. His loincloth does not cover his butt or his chest, and he is viewed as clothed even when both are conspicuously bare. Streets of Rage isn't big on butts, but still portrays many half-naked men. Shiva is shirtless; so are Max and Floyd. Their motions are heavy and stiff, flexing their muscles with every labored strike. But they could get away with Urien's thong if they wanted to.

A woman can show neither without being perceived as naked. This is due to the female body as being inherently feminine, thus sexual, inside the traditional system. The same system tends to treat women as perpetually naked, or "naked enough." In 2010, a female fan asked Blizzard if they could make powerful female heroes that didn't look like Victoria's Secret models. Blizzard mocked her. So did men booing loudly from the audience. 

This misogyny extends far beyond content creators and consumers proudly holding hands; fan artists who align with either will sexualize anything that's remotely perceived as female. Apparently this includes Shy Guys? Under these conditions, Blaze Fielding's body is a reliably source of "fan service." Every kick and punch is accented by girly squeals and provocative poses that, if they don't excite players outright, personify the fighting woman as idealized. Nobody's saying this out loud; they're advertising it through the characters' coded body language. 

This code inevitably leads to skewed views of what female power even is. For example, a masculine women like Estel upholds the status quo and is assimilated, but would still be observed as being "like a guy!" regardless. Blaze is seemingly more middle-of-the-road, representing so-called "female strength" through her sexy movements. Other characters, like Diva and Nora, serve to illustrate a classic argument—that feminine woman only have power over men when tempting them. This can be by aggressively seducing them, or simply being a female sex object that men can admire whenever they want. 

All of these women are constructed to serve the heroic symbolic order. The sex object serves the hero's sexual needs (and the needs of the hero's target audience); the seducer serves the hero's desire to kill and control those around him. However, either position could theoretically be reclaimed by taking that power for themselves. This includes using transgressive symbols 

• to be independently sexual. The sex worker can seize the means of production through sex work that isn't dictated by male bosses—i.e., the worker can choose to meet the demands of whomever.
• to tell their stories with symbols of punishment. The image of the witch or demon are normally assigned as punishments within the heroic system by the system. By humanizing the witch or the demon, the agent undermines the system by exposing the hero, thus the system they represent, as villainous.

The next section shall explore the wider functions of service to the hero, how this service is compelled, and what effects it has on marginalized groups and their bodies.

Part 3: Marginalized Bodies

Through the creation of statuesque bodies, Western society polices sexuality according to what's allowed and what isn't. Beefy men are not only ubiquitous; the defense of their position is taken up by those who benefit most from what they represent: cis-white, heterosexual men. This accounts for a distinct shortage of soft boys and hard women across the board, but also marginalized bodies: people of color and queer* people.

*Both I continue, I shall define several gender theory terms, as not everyone will be familiar with them:

• Biological sex. What we're born as. Our birth sex.
• Gender. How we identify within society. Who we go to bed as.
• Sexual orientation. What we're sexually attracted to. Who we go to bed with.
• "Cis," or cis-gendered. A cis-gendered person is someone who identifies with their birth sex—i.e., binary gender (man/woman) as tied to biological sex (male/female). This doesn't preclude the existence of other genders; it merely means that cis people have stayed on the side of the isle they were assigned at birth.
• Queer. A "queer" person (short for genderqueer) is someone who identifies with a gender other than their birth sex. Similar terms like "trans" (short for transgender), genderfluid, and non-binary each have narrower definitions and social movements. For the purpose of denoting basic difference in ordinary conversation, however, they are are largely interchangeable.
• Straight. Heterosexual. A cis-person, either a man or a woman, who is sexually attracted to the opposite sex. "Cis-het" is shorthand for their gender and sexual orientation.
• Gay. Homosexual. A cis or queer person who is sexually attracted to the same sex as them. Although traditionally assigned to homosexual men, the term has expanded to include lesbians. Someone who is attracted to multiple sexes/genders is bisexual/pansexual (these term are interchangeable, and merely place an emphasis on sex or gender within someone's preferences).
• Gender Trouble. Isolated by Judith Butler, gender trouble are the complications that results from trying to separate gender expression from biological sex. The two are fundamentally different, thus separate. Not only do traditional norms arbitrarily combine the two; they enforce this combination through prohibitive education and legislation (re: propaganda). Attempting to raise the issue, often by simply exisiting as a queer person, either results in friendly societal confusion, insufferable chastising, or outright violence.

I do not wish to equate women, people of color and queer people. Their struggles are unique, but sit within a common problem. I want to communicate that each group is dominated according to their bodies as something to regulate and control by those in power. This can be their real bodies, but also their representative bodies commonly depicted, and policed, in media. 

The rest of this section is divided into the following sub-sections:

• Lack of Consent
• Criminal Abuse: Imprison, Fetish and Shame
• Heroic Athletes
• Queer Action Heroes and Gender Trouble
• Gay Men
• Twinks in Danger

Trigger Warning #2: The content in this section is especially difficult. Extreme forms of control and abuse are discussed, including rape, imprisonment, erasure, victim-blaming and murder. 

Lack of Consent

The '80s action hero is a visual standard, one that belies a lack of consent. His mere presence denotes a system of control that is already in place, one that assumes unheroic opposites no one agreed to beforehand. 

To this, the action hero operates like a statue. Strength is visibly displayed through heaps of muscle attached to a male frame. His precious strength is meant to be admired and condoned, the muscles having so many other qualities tacitly assigned to them. In other words, the action hero represents the symbolic order of the human body. 

This status quo is enforced through sexual, gender and racial control, wherein the action hero defines privilige as something applied or denied to marginalized bodies. Women, people of color, and queer people are policed by the very existence of a heroic icon. His burly displays personify strength as literal, but also figurative. The hero is what others are not. He is allowed, and they are not. 

We've already discussed various "olive branches" offered by the system. Therein the muscular woman or centurions of color can uphold the status quo, as Estel and Floyd do, in Streets of Rage 4. The game worryingly illustrates how the system is much less kind towards those who don't. Donovan is stereotypically thuggish, donning shades, blink and sagging pants. He is one of the game's most common enemies, repeatedly smashed to a pulp.

Those who worship the '80s action hero condemn the hero's enemies in equal measure. The symbol order renders the fan all but incapable of imagining anything outside of their "might makes right" mentality. Not only are the realms of mutual consent alien to such a person; so is the notion that a submissive individual—and bodies traditionally associated with submission or control—can even have power to start with. 

In the realms of mutual consent, strength is more than muscles; the bodies of the participants can theoretically be whatever they want. Relative to our bodies, consent is thus the means to choose one's persona in real life, or avatar in videogames. For consent to exist, people must be able to choose their heroic bodies. But the heroes in Streets of Rage are tellingly few. The villains are more, but exclude many body types themselves. There's good, evil, and alien.

Whether as heroes or villains, marginalized groups do consent to how they are historically portrayed. Thanks to the heroic standard already mentioned, women, people of color and queer people generally cannot chose their bodies. Either the choices they want do not exist, or the choice is made for them through proliferate, status quo advertising. 

This stance is not without counterarguments. Several include:

• "No one is forcing anyone to do anything!" 
• "She's choosing to do this!"

These detractors are missing the point: Choice is impossible if the options do not exist. My mother can opt for girly makeup and the appearance of "girly" more generally as a form of play. But forcing her only to do this, which would've happened through a lack of options in the '70s and '80s, is not strictly speaking consent. 

The same idea should be applied to bodies in media as representing all peoples' desires to choose. This should be respected by a variety of hero body types, instead of the traditional standard and nothing else. Though gradually expanding over time, these options are still lagging behind. This is doubly true in nostalgia media. Excluding Cherry as the rock-'n-roll youngster, the heroes and villains in Streets of Rage 4 are virtually no different than they were thirty years ago. 

A common rebuttal is "white oppression." This spurious claim, at least in part, argues that men are forced to inhabit their own heroic positions. While it is true that middle class white men are subject to some degree of control according to the heroic model, white privilege grants them more freedom to choose their body type. The beef lord undoubtedly reigns supreme in Streets of Rage, but the variety remains highest for male players: The game has five male heroes, and three female.

Arguments about demand trumping representation fall flat if you consider the source. Men frame themselves as money-paying consumers, a gaming culture whose fans deserve to get what they want. Marginalized groups can't consent to this; they can only refuse to play. Marginalized gamers aren't just slaves to dominate consumer models; games like Streets of Rage poorly represent the prisoner status of their cultural heroes. 

Criminal Abuse: Imprison, Fetish and Shame

Barring the one percent, we're all slaves to power (and even the ultra-wealthy die). Power assigns the heroic role as a element of control. This be said, marginalized bodies are controlled differently than white men. Thus, "hero" has a very different meaning for oppressed groups than it does '80s action fans. For the oppressed, hero means prisoner, a status that reflects in their bodies as controlled. This includes

• imprisoning them
• fetishizing them
• shaming them

Depending on how you look at it, prisoner heroes don't exist in Streets of Rage, or do exist but only as victims for the player to assault. Rather, its marginalized bodies are oppresses through action hero privateers. These renegades are supported by the state, functioning as cops despite having left the force. 

But imprison takes many forms. The type of state oppression relies on the marginalized group being controlled:

• The Gothic heroine is routinely captured, and held against her will.
• A slave heroine like Margaret Garner is constantly hunted once she escapes; modern people of color fear a return of slavery.
• Queer heroes are either tragic, demonized, or excluded entirely.

Streets of Rage's ludology doesn't support all of these scenarios. There is no Gothic heroine, and queer characters don't exist at all. Slaves exist, insofar as criminals are shaped and smashed by the state, but none of this is explored in an active manner. It's simply an excuse to crack skulls.

Gameplay in the present emulates gameplay from the '90s that coincided with aforementioned bipartisan support for Tough-on-Crime policies. Arguments painting Streets of Rage as wholly neutral deliberately ignore the social boundaries orbiting written law as something not only to enforce, but endorse through public sentiment. This sentiment includes beat-'em-ups, whose very ludology is a method of expressing and reinforcing public attitudes about marginalized groups: Beat them up. 

This whole ordeal is further complicated by criminality as a status that's assigned to marginalized bodies, often to fetishizing extremes. 

For example, Diva and Nora are clearly fetishized in Streets of Rage 4. They misbehave, and the hero effectively spanks them for being bad (Nora really seems to enjoy this). Besides these two, so many of their partners in crime have sculpted or shapely bodies the player can enjoy looking at.

A byproduct of '80s nostalgia, Streets of Rage 4 unsurprisingly lacks queer representation. Instead of showing them, it hides queer people from view. For the rest of this subsection, I'd like to explore why. 

The traditional groups that most openly antagonize queer people lust after them behind closed doors. Though perhaps not on par with the barely-concealed homosexual urges of the Catholic priest, the hypocrisy of someone like Nick Fuentes is still something to consider. 

Fuentes is an alt-righter who condemns homosexuality. He nonetheless sleeps with the very people he seeks to dominate, specifically catboys. Fuentes' outlier position as an alt-right extremist might be used to distance him from other conservatives. Nevertheless, his paradoxical affiliation with catboys crystallizes competing notions that are often suppressed by conservatives overall: 

• Such expressions are taboo, and accessed safely behind closed doors. 
• Access provides a momentary "release" of control that is nonetheless dictated.

In conservative circles, queers bodies are criminal, but nonetheless permitted to exist through taboo forms of love that invariably remain fetishized. 

Through its own heteronormative framework, Streets of Rage isn't equipped to handle queerness. Its sex objects, including its heroes, are all cis and straight. Provided its framed in a positive manner, the appearance of queer characters in a future sequel would seem to constitute emancipation from the usual concealment. Unfortunately conservative fans use body shaming to argue that certain bodies promote unhealthy habits, thus make for "poor" heroes:

• Fat bodies promote laziness (a racist concept all on its own).
• Queer bodies promote promiscuity and bad morals.
• Prurient bodies defile the institutions of marriage.

If this sounds like a stupid joke, it should be. Alas, this policing is not a flaw, but the system of traditional enforcement working as intended. 

Traditional bodies promote their own bad habits, but especially sexual control. Much of the irony lies in the bodies being policed. Those subject to shame—those with higher BMIs, in particular—are often physically healthier than those chasing the dragon with sculpted, massive bodies (re: heart attacks stemming from steroid abuse). And sex work is perfectly fine as long as it's consensual. 

To be clear, the sexual control of women by men is not consensual. But it is ubiquitous inside traditional spheres because heroic women are not allowed to be ugly. At the same time, traditionalists increasingly define female beauty with pornographic language that reveals their mounting cognitive dissonance. It's really quite strange, but further speaks to the problems of such a worldview when confronted with any kind of alternative.

Alternatives generally occur through fantasies of assimilation that imitate the oppressor. Through a desire to fit in, survive, or excel, people of color can put on a mask to appear white (re: Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, 1952); woman can put on muscle (or a bikini) to please those in charge. But putting on one's own gender identity is something else entirely. The action hero is traditionally white, male, and athletic, but also cis. There's nothing the queer person can put on that equates to this. Thus, the desire—to have one's existence recognized—is unique to queer individuals under the current regime. 

This owes itself partly to the world of sports, and its refusal to honor queer athletes at all. While generally synonymous with the world of professional sports, athlete heroism can colonialize mass media outside of sports proper. We'll explore this colonization next, including what effects it has on queer people and their bodies. 

Sports Heroism

From a traditional standpoint, the hero's journey is the path to self-individuation.  Sports heroism is self-individuation achieved through sports. There's a market for this, and it's seldom queer-inclusive. We've already explored how the market forces female heroes to be beautiful, and black heroes to be athletes. We've yet to discuss how queer people are alienated by the same market. 

Queer bodies and their struggles correspond to a market designed to exclude them. The market standard for the action hero is hypermasculine. This masculinity doesn't exist in a vacuum; it's embodied by competitive athletes who emulate the athletic hero's body as a means of reliable success in the world at large. Through their success, they reinforce the standard that alienates queer people.

As already mentioned, Streets of Rage is not a sports game; its heroes still have the bodies of cis-gendered athletes. As the game floods the screen with images of the athletic hero, this deluge parallels similar streams unleashed by professional sports. Both reinforce standards that are unequivocally harmful to queer people. Whereas "empowered" women or people of color have their place in professional sports, queer variants are generally anathema. They're seen as a threat to the status quo by virtue of translating the hero's body into something "incompatible." 

Queer people, though especially trans people, are seen as incompatible with professional sports. Thus the exclusion of queer people occurs on a massive scale—in sports, or media affiliated with sports in some shape or form. This includes Streets of Rage. Not only are queer people excluded as heroes, in-game; the few instances that remain stem from the misconception that gender performance and sexual orientation are one in the same. As a result, homosexuality is unheroic, while queerness simply doesn't exist. 

This is hardly a figure of speech. Those in power frequently impose a scientific order onto queer people's gender, foisting onto them the unwanted roles of man or woman as tied to binary sex. Thus, queerness is not only policed, but totally alienated by traditional norms in mass media. 

These norms are spearheaded by the '80s action hero as nostalgically reinforced through the world of popular sports. As something to chronicle, nostalgia becomes something to fondly embellish through sports narratives being revisited over and over. This can be seen in Streets of Rage 4's lovingly retro aesthetic, which mirrors the likes of retro sportscasters like Joe Vincent, Boxing Legends TV, and Rummy's Corner. In this sense, the heroic athlete is not merely the action hero personified through professional sports; he is Beowulf, constantly revising his own glory through grander retellings.   

For the rest of this sub-section, we'll explore threat that the hypermasculine heroic athlete presents to queer people.

The two kinds of heroic athlete we'll be examining are

• Competitive strength athletes. Athletes lift weights to see who is physically stronger, or whose body appears more manly after the fact.
• Contact sports athletes. Athletes beat each other into submission to determine a victor.

Furthermore, we'll largely be focusing on male athletes. While female examples certainly exist, the hypermasculine standard focuses on masculine, physical strength as essentially male; from the '80s into the present, it was less about one man simply beating another, and more about male displays of strength that upheld the status quo. 

Often viewed as action heroes by their fans, heroic athletes represents the zenith of male strength as a total, holistic position. This includes

• sex appeal
• gender performance as centered on strength
• intelligence 
• and other traditionally sequestered virtues

In other words, the athletic hero is a superman. And while Streets of Rage 4 doesn't openly declare Axel the end-all-be-all of manhood, his fans will happily oblige. For them, Axel embodies the supreme athletic potential of man. So do Adam, Floyd, Max and Shiva. Stronger-looking than any of the women, they are Achilles, they are Beowulf. They are full of shit.

That doesn't matter, because they have agency. Queer people do not. To this, the staging of the hero as queer is generally disallowed at all, save by stupidly muscular men whose hyperbolic brawn affords them a kind of "male currency." A WWE wrestler, Eric Bugenhagen's entire image is built around this idea. Here, he plays guitar naked for his wife (who reportedly can't resist his sonic charms). Eddie Hall, a famous strongman, can also take the piss by wearing a ballerina's pink leotard and doing backflips. The performance of either man is intentionally bad, ridiculing queerness while someone like Ladybeard* happily delights in the same position.

*Ladybeard is the bearded Aussie wrestler from Japanese death metal band Ladybaby.

The power to lampoon oneself was famously employed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, the action star's action star. Bugenhagen and Hall use the same privilige to effectively behave however they want. In doing so, they're celebrated for their irony by effectively reinforcing the status quo. What seems to be parody isn't, because both men are directly benefiting from the idea. They rehabilitate the hypermasculine male as superior by clumsily recuperating queer images into their own image. They're attempting to act as something other than hypermasculine, except they have no idea what queer even means.

It's also worth noting that Bugenhagen and Hall are tremendously active online, using using social media to advertise the fruits of their labors: 

• trophy wives
• expensive gyms
• mansion-like houses
• fancy gadgets
• succulent food
• beautiful, healthy children with superior genes

Both men are millionaires, and show this off as part of their choice to be professional athletes. Meanwhile, the continuous "flexing" of the nuclear family is part of a bigger lie: These persons aren't successful because they're cis-het white men; they're successful because they're "naturally gifted."

To be fair, Bugenhagen and Hall have had long successful careers, but any natural athleticism they have is invariably reinforced by the performance-enhancing drugs they take to compete at the top. They might be occasionally candid about this. More often than not, they credit hard work and determination for their successful-looking bodies. These men are real in the sense that their bodies are real; they're made of flesh and blood. But everything about them is product placement. 

The same qualities apply to literal cartoon characters. People will see Axel or Blaze in Streets of Rage and think, "They must work out." Their bodies are destinations; they visually translate to ultimate success, the kind that sits at the end of so many people's goals—goals informed by the world of sports, its heroes, and all of the media produced by and for them.

The Great Divide

Alas, since traditional heroism works through a system of binaries, success must have a polar opposite. But queer people aren't failures; they're oppressed by a system that controls bodies by dividing them: Men must compete with men, and women with women. This competition occurs inside and outside of actual sports, with the heroic athlete working as a billboard for traditional values. 

At a social level, these men aren't just impeccable warriors; they're sex symbols and family men. There's no clear distinction between the three, because the advertisement is promising many things at once. Material success and sexual rewards are linked to the cause as something to join.

Though not always married with kids, they are typically cis-het. And those who worship them through material means demonstrate a kind of infinite growth that mirrors their ceaseless, coded epithets. In particular, the athletic heroic's sense of "natural strength" leads to dubious forms of godhood—i.e., these men have "ascended to the next level." Except they're always climbing to a better and better spot. Not only is this complete and utter bullshit; the much-touted climb is phrased in increasingly hyperbolic language. 

Often, this language is borrowed from Dragon Ball Z and other shonen anime. In their terms, these athletes are super saiyans, warrior men from another planet who only grow stronger as they train. They win not because they're "special," but because they're champions who work hard. Small caveat: They're secretly gods of war! These contradictions are less about strength and more about communicating a sense of power to those who feel entitled. It's effectively Ayn Rand's objectivism married to the Protestant work ethic, then wrapped in shonen culture. 

These shonen attitudes can be seen in Streets of Rage 4. Axel and Shiva are not competitive athletes, but sport the bodies of such men. Meanwhile, Axel's fists catch flame when he's mad; Shiva darts around like an anime edgelord, invisible save for the purple glow he leaves in his wake. It's everything that strongmen fans imagine their heroes capable of doing provided they actually were superheroes. 

In professional sports, strength and contact sports that center on traditional notions of strength are divided strictly between men and women. With the exception of female gymnastics and similar sports that beautify women to victimizing extremes, much of the money and attention is focused on men by men. The aim of these sports is not simply to illustrate dominance from heterosexual, hypermasculine men towards each other and outlier groups, but to present their Herculean displays of strength as continuously vital inside a system that rewards them for presenting as such. 

For instance, the sport of strongman, including its fans, are more likely to tolerate queer athletes if they visually support this idea—i.e., if they "pass" as hypermasculine men. The more you can pass, the more likely you are to be assimilated. For example, Rob Kearney came out in 2014 as the only openly gay strongman, and visually "passes" quite well. Passing isn't always the point. As Kearney explains in a 2019 interview, "as female-to-male you can compete whenever you’d like to." 

In other words, transphobes in sports don't care about the gender identity. They merely see women as naturally weak, thus not a threat when "in disguise" as trans men (or simply cis-women who simply want to be muscular); their natural disadvantages cannot hope to challenge the status quo. 

In the same interview, Kearney says, "Male-to-female there are some parameters around testosterone levels and testing. There was a lot of pushback, and some state chairs quit, but I think it’s absolutely a step in the right direction." Not everyone agrees with him, though. Joe Rogan, a contact sports athlete, has repeatedly used openly sexist and transphobic language when arguing that trans women like Fallon Fox possess unfair advantages against cis-women, all while failing to understand that hormone therapy alters one's natural muscle mass and bone density over time, some women have higher bone density than men, and so on. 

For strength or contact sports, the trans woman is a threat to the status quo. Not only do individual sports fans mispresent trans women as cheaters; the status quo will defend itself by platforming men like Rogan to spread misinformation and present the traditional standard as besieged. This conservative victim culture is pure AstroTurf, with Rogan in particular granted a $100 million exclusivity deal with Spotify for his podcast. He's hardly a man of the people, but a dishonest grifter who implores their support through fabricated common ground.

Rogan's argument is seemingly made to protect women, but this kind of conservative rhetoric merely frames trans women as murderous men-in-disguise, brutally smashing the records (or skulls) of female athletes. His purported chivalry is hardly virtuous; "Think of the women!" is less him actively caring about women and more about keeping queer athletes out of sports. Preserving the false binary of a "natural order" is paramount, and Rogan has proved he's not above making bogus scientific claims, so long as these grant his bullying a dint of reason, thus legitimacy. 

Queer Action Heroes and Gender Trouble

Outside of sports, queer performance is entirely possible in the action hero role. In other words, queer heroes can be action-driven. But many queer heroes are tragic, and subject to gender trouble that is completely alien to Streets of Rage 4's ludology and audiovisuals. 

Queer action heroes are certainly possible. I distinctly recall the sleek, boyish yakuza from Kill Bill, part 1, effortlessly ending the life of O-Ren Ishii's seemingly invincible father. And the red-haired trans Reaper, Grelle Sutcliff, exemplifying the hero as encased within a traditionally effeminate body. Alas, Axel Stone and Adam Hunter represent the hero in the '80s image of statuesque, cis-het fighters like Tommy Morrison and Mike Tyson. 

Heroic bodies change with the times, including how they are perceived. Consider the transition from the Bruce Lee road warriors seen in Fist of the North Star's to the ambiguously gay "beef lords" from Jo-Jo's Bizarre Adventure. But Streets of Rage 4 refuses to make the journey. After almost thirty years, its characters are virtually unchanged. If anything, its male characters have only bulked up.

Beyond the hypermasculine male, there's always the potential for other heroic bodies. It's just not part of the nostalgia Streets of Rage 4 has contributed to. There's no twunk* on par with Link from The Legend of Zelda, for example. Nor is any Amazons on par with the powerful Gerudo. Yes, Estel is big and tough, but we need someone that she can visually challenge. Instead of standing over the men like Lady Dimitrescu did over Even Winters, every male characters is bigger and stronger-looking than Estel.

*Twunk stems from homosexual body language, which tends to assign hyper-precise terms based on physical attributes.

Whereas cis action heroes are generally empowered through bodies that adhere to the heroic standard, queer heroes that deviate from this standard are increasingly disempowered and alienated through gender trouble. Gender trouble can be general confusion about what someone is—what to identify them as according to societal norms. More often than not, it involves leads to territorial violence committed against queer people by traditionally-minded hate groups. 

Such groups hate everyone different than them, so it doesn't matter to them if they lack the language needed to distinguish if someone is cis or not; nor does it matter that gender identity and expression are fundamentally different from someone's sexual orientation. For them, "gay" becomes a convenient catch-all, reduced to its older slur form before generally giving way to far uglier hate speech. 

This lack of distinction was common in '80s media, which simply lacked the language to say anything more precise (as conservative epochs generally do). For example, if an '80s movie didn't call a queer person gay, it would prescribe them as "transsexual." Generally seen as pejorative, this usage of transsexual attempts to connect gender to sex by insisting that gender can only change is sex is changed (re: sex change operations). 

For queer people, gender trouble can be caused by simply how feminine they appear. This struggle is totally antithetical to Streets of Rage 4. Its heroes not only have tacit state support; their cis-het action bodies reinforce the heroic status quo:

• Axel, Adam, Floyd, and Max are all hypermasculine.
• Cherry and Blaze are both hyperfeminine.

In other words, they don't look or act queer. None of the heroes do (Shiva and Estel are respectively less masculine and feminine; they also default as villains). They don't have to worry about called slurs, or being physically attacked for what they are.

Assimilation is another problem. It would be entirely possible for the developers to say that Estel is gay. They don't. However, while any of these characters could be gay from a paratextual standpoint, their bodies still perceived as straight by action hero fans. We've already discussed that male action heroes are athletes and that male athletes are expected to be cis, het and hypermasculine; likewise, that women, but especially girly women, tend to function as sex objects fetishized by heterosexual men. 

Conversely Sugar from Streets of Rage 4 does not fill this role. As one of the game's ambiguously gay characters, she is a racialized, gender-swap version of the gay biker trope: the fat, sassy black women. There's absolutely nothing wrong with Sugar's BMI. What is wrong is how the game's only queer character foists racial, sexist and queer stereotypes into a throwaway villain role. This framing reinforces queer animus already present within the game's entitled fanbase. On the game's own wiki, one enraged fan writes about Sugar, 

• These lesbian dwarves are the type of enemy I hate the most. I imagine them naked and doing nasty stuff and I almost throw up, can't stand the idea of my character touching them. Lesbians must be beautiful and slender and classy. Not those ugly sacks of lard.

Gay Men

Unlike Sugar, the gay man is conspicuously missing from Streets of Rage 4. There are no gay male heroes, nor any attempt at gay male villains on par with Ash, the gay biker sub-boss removed from Streets of Rage 3. Ash felt so cartoonishly Gay™ as to be made from a hateful, ill-informed mind. It's true that Hard Gay is basically the same design; he's also the hero that Ash, in Streets of Rage, is not.

Terms that recognize gay men are incredibly varied. Plenty of terms focus on body hair (otter, bear, polar bear, etc). There's also hairier forms of gender expression that may or may not even be gay (re: Ladybeard). We'll be focusing on muscle mass.

For our purposes, hunk, twunk, and twink are the three basic types of gay men:

• hunk: muscular, masculine
• twunk: muscular, feminine 
• twink: non-muscular, feminine

Hunks are the burliest of the bunch. Twunks remain muscular despite appearing somewhat feminine (re: Link). Not only this, but hunk and twunk bodies can either "pass" for straight, or otherwise assimilate with straight male culture. For all we know, the heroes in Streets of Rage 4 are gay. Even if they were, they'd still be described as hunks (or maybe twunk in Shiva's case). 

The same cannot be said for twinks. Because they are outwardly feminine and delicate, it'd be hard to convince anyone that Axel and the other men in Streets of Rage 4 are twinks. However, there's another wrinkle. The twink stereotype features a non-muscular, feminine gay man who is incredibly attractive and stupid (again, according to the stereotype, not real life). 

This poses a problem: Because twinks don't blend in quite so well, and can't protect themselves if they stand out, they are more often in danger.

Twinks in Danger

While not all queer victims in media are twinks, many twinks are victims. This isn't to say that hunks or twunks are any less valid or oppressed. It's just that twink heroes fundamentally exist as victims in outspoken queer media. This operates in direct contrast with Streets of Rage 4, whose violent heroes aren't allowed to be gay or victims. 

The point of the twink is to criticize heteronormative culture as inherently predatory. By suffering at their hands, the twink exposes sexually-motivated violence made against queer people more generally. For example, the works of Gregg Araki and Dennis Cooper often show twinks being raped and murdered by straight enemies who are paradoxically attracted to them:

• Straight men often masturbate to anatomical cues. This includes images of the penis regardless if its attached to men or to women; i.e., futanari. 
• Gender norms are already fairly different in Japan (whose feminist components have been historically associated with submission to their Western occupiers); hate groups' overconsumption of Japanese sex media leads to harmful attitudes towards marginalized groups that are fetishized by said media.
• Hate criminals' "attraction" to queer people stems less from closeted homosexuality as a confused act, and more from a desire to dominated a marginalized group through brutal acts of sexual control. For those in control, any sense of "joy division" creates boundaries that can be crossed without fear of punishment—a slap on the wrist.

These factors highlight the kinds of unwanted sexual attention that queer bodies receive from their abusers. It's a disturbing kind of normal that's unimaginable to cis-het people, including their action heroes.

To be fair, cis-het can be sexually alienated through their own bodies. Each requires its own performance, concentrically housed in larger spheres of power that grant the actor limited range. Sigourney Weaver and Daniel Kaluuya cannot voice their concerns, so much as play them out their respective stories:

• In Alien (1979), Ellen Ripley is a Gothic hero. Harassed by an idealized, rapist perpetrator, she is continuously spectated by the Male Gaze. 
• In Get Out, Jonathan Washington is a slave hero. He cannot move or scream, is literally paralyzed by white power.

But the struggles of either ultimately differ from queer alienation. Trauma, whether through taboo sex or extreme violence, are invariably tied to gender trouble inside the queer experience. Gender trouble is something cis-het people do not have to face because they conform to a default gender identity and sexual orientation. By comparison, queer people are not the default, and conforming provides them with a sense of inner conflict (re: gender dysphoria) even when they try to appear normal on the outside. 

Queer agents cannot choose to face gender trouble; they can choose to perform their daily struggles through art. To this, Streets of Rage is ill-equipped to give them the means. Dennis Cooper is far more niche, but also someone whose radical approach cannot appear in Streets of Rage. Through his own special brand, he frames the queer subject as voluntarily participating in self-violence, real or fabricated, to communicate atrocities through an obvious theatrical counterpart. This can be a monster, or, in the case of the twink, an ideal queer victim. In doing so, queer performers represent violence through their own bodies, thus commenting on real-world events and real-world hate. 

Obviously this kind of choice is completely denied to Streets of Rage players. There's no option to submit, thus humanizing yourself as the victims of police violence. Nor is there any attempt to treat the violence as anything other than cartoonish, good-versus-evil schlock. Conversely Cooper's serial brutalization of twinks is both something to express and to witness. By desiring them, he grants them a strange voice to express a side of themselves that's normally repressed by society. 

For example, Frisk (1991) chronicles the alleged exploits of a serial murderer who targets twinks. These beautiful men (and boys) are desired, abused, and killed. I felt pity at first. As time went on, though, I couldn't help but sense that something else was going on—a strange sense of playfulness tied to twinks being "murdered." As horrible as the acts being depicted were, it was thrown into question by Cooper's framing of it.

For starters, the narrator is unreliable, retelling his exploits from a letter that may or may not be true. Second, his victims are often complicit. Cooper's twinks are sex workers that deliberately lead themselves into trouble. Partly they're accustomed to the threat as default, and keep their complaints to themselves. However, one performer agrees to have their body used as an art prop—not just "murdered," but sexually brutalized. Their anus is decorated with gruesome makeup to make it look bloodied with realistic wounds. 

Despite the attempts are verisimilitude, the display feels over-the-top. The performer must play dead to sell the performance to the man who paid for it, a seedy rental store clerk. This raises all kinds of questions about what's going on:

• the performer and their motives
• the patron and what he's up to
• the exhibit and what it represents
• us and why we're even looking

At every level, Frisk presents desire and the objects of desire as deliberately difficult and confusing to process. Cooper's victims inside a framework where consent sits in a strange grey area, a liminal performance caught between the desire to express actual atrocities and the desire to inhabit playful variations for their own sake. Maybe to cope, maybe to learn. Whatever the case, Cooper's violence is fictional. Thus it safely communicate the issues at hand, while treating ghastly violence as inextricable from, and suppressed within, the queer experience. 

By comparison, nothing in Streets of Rage is remotely ambiguous. The violence is straightforward, the roles are clear cut. The heroes are good, the villains are bad, the men are strong, the women are sexy. Everyone is straight. And yet, there's something wholly dishonest about the nature of the story. It's feels like a deliberately-crafted lie that's presented as wholesome, genuine fun. But it omits the truth of what the '80s actually were in the process. Cooper wouldn't dare.

In his own stories, the writer Oscar Wilde brought qualities of the queer existence to normal, decent society. Lying, Wilde showed his readers, was part of the queer existence. And yet, instead of realizing the criminal deviant that sits at the heart of standard homophobia, we were given a playful aesthete who took it upon himself to lie with purpose—to illustrate as much as anyone can, the paradox of different positions within a single person by which to bring average people to a better level of understanding regarding those different from themselves. 

Streets of Rage 5 could benefit from the same approach. By abandoning its forebears' devotion to dated pastiche, it could allow queer heroes to thrive in the same lively sphere. Perhaps a twink could uses violence against themselves to make a point, while still furthering the standard Streets of Rage narrative by turning this violence against his attackers. Think Athena's Aegis, except gay and/or genderqueer. With their hideous reflection through back at them, these attackers turn to stone.

The unlikelihood of such a compromise illustrates a hidden purpose to the Streets of Rage hero: To hide what gay or queer people even are, including the struggles they heroically face everyday.

Conclusion

Streets of Rage 4 proves that action heroes matter to a great many people. But equally important is the study and criticism of those heroes, especially their connection with the real world. 

Likewise, we should investigate the troublesome idea that nostalgia is absolute and precious—that its dated views of the past can reshape the future into something harmful. This includes the action hero as a role model who champions state control. Rather than let this happen, we should trade harmful nostalgia for pictures of home that invite flexible worldviews. Sex and power do not vanish. All that disappears is the creation of heroes that feel impervious to criticism: those protected by the state as champions of the status quo. 

In light of the giant, class-action lawsuit against Activision Blizzard and the company's raft of sexual abuse scandals, one source put it best:

"Worship of specific hero figures and being untouchable/inner circle is just so baked into [Blizzard’s] culture."

This isn't just frat boy culture festering inside an obviously reviled game company. The status quo is constantly reinforced by games like Streets of Rage 4 that borrow from thousands of other games and movies with similar problematic heroes. 

By altering the perception of these heroes, strength isn't hoarded and repeatedly forced into arrogant, threatening displays by hypermasculine men; displays of force are replaced with forms of collaboration between privileged and marginalized bodies. From there, the next generation can imagine a better world, one whose action heroes slowly abandon the continuation of violence and control present within all levels of society.  

***

About me: My name is Nick van der Waard and I'm a Gothic ludologist. I primarily write reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews. Because my main body of work is relatively vast, I've compiled it into a single compendium where I not only list my favorite works, I also summarize them. Check it out, here!

I'm an artist and a writer. If you're interested my work and are curious about illustrated or written commissions, please refer to my website for more information. If you want to contact me about a guest article, please use this contact form or reach out to me on Discord (vanderWaardart#5394)!

If you want to make donations, you can directly support my artwork on Patreon and my writing on Ko-Fi!