A Random Pile of Stuff

This is likely because it was very obviously a declined G.I.Joe script rapidly reworked to be a Street Fighter movie, to the point elements of the Cobra Island arc and the episode "Iceberg Goes South" are blatantly present.

(you can hear them wanting to say "Cobra, a Ruthless Terrorist Organization Determined to Rule the World" in that text scroll)

To this point:

All of Guile's dialog sound entirely natural coming out of Duke. Every M. Bison line sounds like a Cobra Commander rant. You've got a bald arms dealer with a unique facial accessory watching his own ass while supplying main bad, am I describing Sagat or Destro? (The answer is yes.)

You've got a tech-head baddie who acts as a snarky Greek chorus and is solely driven by money, Dee-Jay is the Crimson Twins.

Cammy fills Scarlett's Role (hello, I am girl, I hit things) but could be Lady Jaye, Chun Li is an amalgam of Jinx and Covergirl (I'd bet money if we found the original Joe script this was reworked from 'Jinx gets put in a sexy red dress' would have been in there.)

But it's not just the mains.

The Blanka storyline is flat out the animal-hybrid Neoviper plot from "Iceberg Goes South" right down to a coerced scientist of color with a strong accent turning a captured hero into a monstrous manimal mutant. In the cartoon Iceberg is mutated into a sentient orca, but it was also full of evil furries that are far closer to what Carlos Blanka becomes. Dr. Mindbender's lines are all handed to Cobra Commander M Bison to keep the cast trim, but it's the same dang story.

The Ken/Ryu subplot features a Ken/Ryu pair that plays like a mix of Quick Kick, Lt. Falcon and Snake-Eyes, rolled into 2 characters into three, with Vega being Storm Shadow here.

The B-Squad is less specifically Joeish, except for T. Hawk being Spirit Ironknife. Sagawa was added into the script later in development due to Capcom plans, so he has no G.I.Joe analogue. Zangief's archetype would have been filled by whatever dumb Cobra goon (my money is on Big Boa or Ripper) Hasbro wanted to sell as part of a movie assortment.

Along the same line, E. Honda and Balrog could have been anyone. If I were re-adapting it into a Joe movie I'd put them as Dial-Tone and Roadblock, for reasons of iconic-ness and their cover as cameramen/techs for Chun-Li, but they're too vague to really nail down compared to the others.

And yeah, I could just settle on the cast as evidence, but there's also the presence of a high-speed boat chase as a major set piece in a movie called "Street Fighter", and the fact that, not to be deterred, Hasbro turned it into a G.I.Joe toyline ANYWAY.

So yeah, Street Fighter (1994) is the best live action G.I.Joe Movie, quite possibly intentionally.

Ice never sinks in it, for one.

In case you're wondering, the second best is MegaForce.

The Ottolenghi - it is vital that you use 1g of this very expensive ingredient. It comes from a 500g bag with a one-week shelf life.

The time machine - 15-minute recipe! First, leave to marinate overnight...

The dishwasher - one-pot recipe! Now decant your ingredients and wipe out your pot. And again. And again. And again.

The optimist - cook the onions until caramelised (2 minutes).

The kindergarten teacher - get one nommable little tree of broccoli and bosh that into boiling water. Delish!

The brand names only - ingredients: Ritz crackers, Philadelphia cheese, Cool Whip, orange Jell-o...

The 1950s palate - use one (1) clove of garlic and a small pinch of chili flakes (omit if preferred).

Finished up some of my drawings, one of them is this tribute I made for Micheal Keating.

I was at Anthrocon helping to vend this weekend, and one of my fav downtime activities was chilling at the university library. but I happened to leave my little art journal there >_____<

every fat person you know for the most part probably has a story like this, of medical neglect. many of the stories i've heard personally are when the complaint or the doctor wasn't related at all, like being told to lose weight at the ear nose and throat doctor or at the dentist. it's straight up just bias. it's such a thing that in the show Shrill it's portrayed, when Aidy Bryant goes to the gynecologist and her doctor suggests she get gastric bypass.

the studies on health and fatness are simply not that black and white and there is basically no research that shows that more than an incredibly tiny minority of people can lose weight and keep it off for more than like 2 years. bodies have set points that they gravitate towards, it's not a personal failure. this also is how the weight loss industry succeeds so well - repeat customers.

some of the harm associated with fatness is also due to weight cycling, which is very hard on your body and is even worse if you get off a GLP1, which according to a recent study causes weight to be regained at a rate that is 4x faster than without taking a GLP1.

you don't have to hate yourself. you don't have to hate other people for their body type either. it makes me so sad to see the thinspo tag going around again in 2026 a lot like it was back in the day.

some resources to learn more here:

https://www.reuters.com/article/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/feeling-fat-may-be-worse-for-you-than-being-fat-idUSTON079061/

So Tale Foundry looks into what makes fan-theory tick.

It's a good watch, but it spoils very little for me to leap off on my little side tangent here.

Fan theory isn't about "predicting" or "solving" stories, it's about telling Them.

I've maintained for a long time that fan theory is a nondiagetic genre of fan fiction. Rather than telling the story in a narrative format or a fan-comic or whatnot, you build a fanfic way of looking at the work.

Most fanfic is written from the standpoint of authorship, whereas Fan Theory is fanfic written from the standpoint of a literary critic. But they're both making a new story. When theorists talk about 'solving' the lore they mean they've written a fic that links all the lore bits and fills in the gaps. It's "big fanon" if that makes sense.

For Examples, I'll be going over some of my favorite Fan Theories:

Subspace/unspace mass-shunting in Transformers was a long-standing fan theory. We didn't call it that, but characters would shrink when they transformed, or Prime's trailer would just happen, or you'd get stuff like this:

In the usenet days, subspace was used as an explanation to the point we called it fanon, but today it would be called a fan theory. Eventually it became the official explanation but at the beginning it was just a minor fix-fic for animators making characters grab accessories from out of nowhere and use toy features that bent the rules of logic.

The classic Marvel No-Prize was essentially an ongoing fix-fic fan theory contest.

For those that don't know, back in the day Marvel had the "No-Prize". You find an error in one of the books, you'd write in and you'd win, well... "no prize." (there may have been certificates at one point, not sure).

But you couldn't claim a no-prize by pointing out a flaw on its own. You had to present it with an explanation for why it wasn't actually an error. Which was a brilliant piece of ludo, turning the process of finding a flaw from a disappointment to a game that simultaneously make you engage more with the fictional universe than one that takes you out of it.

I can probably credit an early childhood desire to win a No-Prize (never did) with the way my brain always looks for a way to fill in a story gap with a reasonable diagetic explanation when confronted with plot holes and story errors.

There Are no Dinosaurs in Jurassic Park

Like any genre of fiction, there's well made and poorly made fan theories, fun and boring ones, trite and creative ones. And sometimes, they do border on the profound.

Tale Foundry at one point laments that he'd rather be digging into the characters and themes than finding something to predict or pull apart. But sometimes those can dovetail, and when they do, it's amazing.

One of my favorite fan theories is that there are no dinosaurs* in Jurassic Park.

Not even these guys:

I forget where I first saw it, but it's been one floating around fan circles for decades. But the short version is: DNA's halflife means that, at least with our current understanding, there's no way to get a gene sequence out of amber-coated mosquitos. If you did, you'd mostly be getting mosquito DNA.

When Hammond's scientists found this out, that wasn't the end of the project. They just switched to modifying extant animals through gene-splicing. We've got cassowaries, we've got hoatzin, we've got crocoiles, lets make us a velociraptor.

Malcom, Grant and Sattler aren't there for a general "endorsement" they've been brought in to make sure that the genetic freaks Wu and the boys cooked up would fool actual experts, because if they can't fool Dr. Alan Grant, there's no way they're going to fool the parade of dinosaur-obsessed children they want to bring in.

There ought to be way more surprises than the dilophosaur venom, all kinds of soft structures and body coverings that wouldn't fossilize easily. But we don't see feathers or quills or brightly colored throat sacks or long rows of keratinus spines on the Brachosaurus's dorsal ridge. For the most part, the dinosaurs are exactly what we expect from 1990s paleontology.

And this theory dovetails beautifully with the themes, because Hammond all but confesses it.

Ellie was right, it is all just a flea circus. She's just more right than she imagined, and Hammond is even more of a reckless fraud. Because there's nothing to learn from these pseudosaurs, except that capitalism will eat you.

*non avian you semantic na'er-do-wells.

And there's meta-fan theories too.

Street Fighter (1994) is a G.I.Joe Movie.

My own personal fan theory is that the script for Street Fighter is clearly a G.I.Joe script. The writer claimed he wrote the script over a weekend for the pitch, and either that involved a lot of cocaine or it involved reworking a script he already had in his back pocket.

I'm going to make it a separate post, but really. You could rotoscope the G.I.Joe cast over that movie and it would still make 100% sense. And would be a better G.I.Joe movie than any other live action effort outside of the accidentally perfect/perfect accidental G.i.Joe Movie, Megaforce.

So, to sum up, fan theorizing has more in common with "My Immortal" than with CinemaSins. There's no real difference between Fic and Theory at the core, just in delivery.

And one you figure that out, as Tale Foundry does, the fun can begin.