Alex Is Still Kissing His Cousin in Street Fighter 6

"A distant relative of my mom or something."

That's the line Capcom landed on. After a month of community outrage, a public apology, and a promise to revise Alex's World Tour storyline in Street Fighter 6, the patch that went live yesterday swaps one word and adds a shrug. Tom, the man who raised Alex and whose daughter Patricia is now Alex's pregnant wife, was previously described as "a cousin of my mom." Now he's "a distant relative of my mom or something." Alex is still married to his blood relative. He just seems less sure about the family tree now.

The original problem surfaced last month when Alex launched as DLC and players dug into his arcade mode story. Alex is an orphan raised by Tom, his father's best friend, making Patricia functionally his stepsister. That's already an odd narrative choice for a beloved Street Fighter 3 character. But the story went further, having Alex explicitly call Tom his mother's cousin, which makes Patricia his second cousin. The reaction on the Street Fighter subreddit was immediate and loud. SF6 director Takayuki Nakayama responded by saying the text would be revised. Capcom even released a short story seemingly aimed at walking back decades of established backstory.

The "Or Something" Fix

The patch notes themselves are almost comically vague, stating only that "some of Alex's World Tour story text has been adjusted in certain languages." No specifics, no explanation of intent. Players had to boot up the game and check for themselves. What they found, as shared on the Street Fighter subreddit, is that the single line about Tom being Alex's mother's cousin now reads as him being a "distant relative... or something." The familial link between Alex and Patricia remains intact. Capcom didn't remove the blood relation. It just made it fuzzier.

I don't understand what Capcom is doing here. The fix was so simple it barely qualifies as work: make Tom a family friend. That's it. Tom was already Alex's father's best friend in existing lore. You remove one line of dialogue, the incest problem vanishes, and the core relationship between Alex and Tom stays exactly the same. Instead, Capcom chose to keep the blood connection and just dress it up with "or something," which reads less like a revision and more like a character who's been coached by a lawyer. If anything, the vagueness invites more scrutiny, not less.

What makes this especially baffling is that Capcom had every reason to just rip the bandage off. Nobody was asking them to preserve the familial link. The entire community response was "please just make them not related." The company had a month to course-correct, acknowledged the problem publicly, and then delivered a patch that changes functionally nothing. Alex is still married to someone he grew up with as a sibling who is also his blood relative. The "or something" doesn't contradict the original line; it just adds plausible deniability that convinces no one.

This is going to follow the character permanently. Street Fighter 6 is in a strong place right now; Alex's launch pushed the game to a new all-time peak on Steam, and the upcoming live-action Street Fighter movie and Evo 2026 season should keep momentum going. But every time Alex shows up in a tournament or a trailer, this is what people will bring up. Capcom had the easiest layup in writing history and somehow bricked it twice.