I wanna do just a little rant here. Don't worry, I won't do it again.
So uh, I noticed that people are getting increasingly becoming "moral police" over fictional characters and of all games they choose to become one, is Tekken. And they just started doing that on the inclusion of Yujiro Hanma from "Baki the Grappler".
Well, this is technically not the start. There has been a similar discussion when talking about Jin's tonal shift in Tekken 6. And the increase of this might have something to do with new generations of fandom treating their art as nothing but a media to consume than to be engaged with.
This bleeds to the rise of...well, AI slop in Tekken fanbase. Go to any Facebook community and you'll see those AI Tekken posters literally anywhere.
Some of them ran through the story and only accepts the surface level interpretation of what is already given to them.
This is the type of stuff that got me thinking, when people said "respect Jin's character because he would never be the bad guy" really didn't understand the full context of his environment and cultural background he was participating in.
Asian culture worships systemic conformity, even when they know it's bad for them. When someone said someone in the Mishima family needs to "break that cycle of abuse", they ignored the ugly part where the problem is so systemically ingrained that even what you think is "one of the good guys who fights against his abusers" can be either the system's enabler themselves... or found dead in the streets as it was staged like an accident for simply wanting an honest life.
Jin's case was the latter. Yes, he was dead and the Devil Gene is the very thing that keeps him alive.
So you can't say "respect Jin's character" without giving Devil!Jin an equal amount of respect to at least offer some insights about Jin's inner conflict. What was this "inner demon" represent in his mind? He hates the Devil Gene, but why? What makes it dangerous? What kind of conversation they have in Jin's head that leads into his decisions of starting the war? Which one of those is external influence and which one comes from his own conscious decision?
And well, how can you comment about Yujiro Hanma being a "terrible person"(he raped Donald Trump, btw) when we have real cases like Jin's story in our everyday lives, and still got away with it?
At the end of day, Tekken is never about "good VS evil", but the "nuance of people's morality in a demonic cycle of systemic abuse". Reducing that nuance removes every dynamic that makes Tekken lore a compelling FG soap opera, and that's a much bigger disrespect for the characters.
