if you haven't noticed, street fighter was kinda the first fighting game to go international and be about the world itself in a way. with over 31 countries represented as stages in this series [and one capcom invented], this series refuses to hide that it's about trekking, infact it was kinda the first before tekken came along. but some characters stand out from this, being listed with no nationality at all-only 22 characters fall under this. removing the robots and actual entities, that's basically 17. most well-known one? why, the funnyman, M. bison, but there's also JP and strangely F.A.N.G. . this article basically exists for me to rant about the specificities of all of this and how we actually know more about bison's potentional places he could've come from than JP-making JP the actual mystery. to further explain why this is somehow in-line with this site: it's a curiousity, deal with it. first of all, F.A.N.G. is listed as unknown even though we know this man's chinese, and necalli, the character nobody cares about, is clearly aztec. kolin's listed as unknown and she's literally the second russian in street fighter [we'll come back to this], so really, that's a few solved. but the entire reason why i'm making this is to specifically note on one character: bison. because compared to JP being 'potentionally french or russian based on his previous names', bison has some actual weight to his two potentional nationalities: russian and thai.
first off, the thai nationality: this one's shakey compared to him being russian, because it basically relies on one thing: gesturing and headcanons. infact, bison being thai has been kinda just a headcanoned thing in some of the community i think? but it's a easy conclusion because in SF2, you fight the characters in where they live. you fight dhalsim in india, you fight chun-li in china, etc. etc. . and with you fighting sagat in thailand, you fight bison in thailand too. this might be just for continuity purposes, y'know you fight sagat and then comes bison, but if we were to assume the matches, then ig he's thai. there's also legend of chun-li cementing this idea in further by having his backstory be that he was basically raised in thailand. that's cute! that's cute, but then comes the second nationality:
the russian nationality proposal for bison, which holds more grip compared to him being thai because of one thing: relations. so, it's canon that decapre is russian, and is a failed cloned prototype for cammy, right? and cammy has been retconned to be a direct clone of bison for ages now, right? then bison's russian. that's it. if decapre came from him, he's russian. but that makes cammy ethnically russian in return, which is interesting.
but all of that doesn't matter in the long run because he'll forever continue to be a mystery in every front, but he's more solved than JP is because JP's mystery comes from the muddling with his names. so, what do you think? do you think bison's a proud SEAsian or do you think he's the most generic nationality pick for a villain in a western film and also basically the second slavic character before kolin came around? ponder on your own. pardon the second odd article, you might see these pop up from time to time.