Sodom

is a fictional character from both the Final Fight and Street Fighter series of video games. He is an American Japanophile, as well as a member of the Mad Gear gang.

Sodom wears tabi and geta, gauntlets, blue jeans, body armor, and a samurai kabuto with a mask. On the front of his outfit, Sodom has attempted to scrawl the Japanese kanji shi (死), meaning "death". However, he has not written the kanji properly, and thus its meaning is lost. He is never seen fighting without a pair of jitte or katana swords, making him one of the few characters to appear in the Street Fighter series to use weaponry. In the Japanese version of Final Fight, the katana are named Masamune and Muramasa. In the first two Street Fighter Alpha games, Sodom uses a pair of jitte as weapons instead of his katana blades from Final Fight. However, in Street Fighter Alpha 3, if the player plays as Sodom in X-ism mode, then Sodom will use his katana blades from Final Fight instead of the jitte.

Sodom originally appeared in the 1989 beat-em-up game Final Fight, where he is the boss of the Subway stage. An underground wrestling promoter dressed in a samurai-style helmet and gear, Sodom fights the player in an underground ring in the Metro City's subway, wielding two katana swords. In 1993's Mighty Final Fight, there are three Sodoms (or Katanas, as the character is called in the English version), known as the Three Katana Brothers.

Sodom's first appearance in the Street Fighter series was in the original Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams on 1995. According to Tatsuya Minami, senior manager of Capcom's Product Planning and Design section, Capcom included Sodom in the game because he was popular and easy to translate to the one-on-one fighting genre. In the Alpha series, he is characterized as an American Japanophile, who is greatly fascinated by Japanese culture but misunderstands it. After being defeated by Guy in Final Fight, Sodom recognizes his wrong perception of Japan and travels there to re-educate himself. He develops a new fighting style based on Japanese and Western martial arts and trades his swords for a pair of jitte. In the first Alpha, he seeks to rebuild the Mad Gear gang by defeating his rival Guy in combat. In his ending, he reforms the gang and holds up a poster reading . In his ending in 1996's Street Fighter Alpha 2, Sodom goes to a sumo ring in Japan to seek new members for the reformed Mad Gear and ends up being challenged by E. Honda. In 1998's Street Fighter Alpha 3, he seeks a new hideout for his gang and goes to claim Shadaloo's new underground base as his own when he learns about it from his former ally Rolento. He crashes his truck into M. Bison's Psycho Drive to foil his plot. Though he is presumed by Chun-Li and Charlie to have died in the explosion, Rolento expresses his belief that Sodom may still be alive.