When Street Fighter 6 was released, my expectations were high. I knew that the story was going to be good, and I was excited about World Tour mode revealing more about JP, Manon, and Marisa. When I saw Lily, I believed that she was going to be a simple character with a simple story, so I didn’t pay much attention to her. The other three surely were going to add mystery and intrigue to the game.
It turns out JP is a typical villain working for Shadaloo, Manon is a model doing model things, and Marisa is thirsty for anyone with a pulse. Plus, there’s nothing about Gill or G yet, so I can’t say anything on whether or not Marisa and Manon are working for them. Lily, on the other hand, has brought the mystery I’ve been craving.
It all started with one scene.
From here, Lily’s plot deepens, and in Street Fighter 6’s World Tour, more is revealed on the pint-sized powerhouse that reveals not what might happen in the future, but what will, and it seems the developers of Street Fighter 6 know exactly what they want to do.
From a story standpoint, Takayuki Nakayama looks to be playing the long game. Previously, the plot looked to be game-by-game, with some interesting character development and scenarios. Street Fighter V, though not great in its execution, was nonetheless a fantastic foundation to build the future story on, and I do believe that in due time, Street Fighter V’s story will eventually be seen as the guide it was meant to be. Going forward, however, there’s a plan in place, and Lily is already one of the driving forces behind it. While Luke is the defacto star of the game and JP is the primary antagonist for now, Lily is the character running the show, and she looks to be one of the centerpieces for Street Fighter’s eventual end game, which is literally the end of the Street Fighter universe and, by definition, the end of the series.
This doesn’t mean Street Fighter is going to end overnight. Being Capcom’s flagship franchise, it’s going to take more than a few games with multiple iterations before the series rides into the sunset for good. However, Street Fighter 6 is setting up a canon end. The series will end tragically. I talk all about this in the article The End of Street Fighter. https://manestreetblog.com/2021/01/19/the-end-of-street-fighter/
So, the question is where does Lily fit into this? How does she become part of Street Fighter’s apocalypse? Quite simply, she’s the next Akuma.
Moreso, it’s DESTINED that she’s bound for evil, and Lily is naive to this fact.
Even Singing Wolf, the Thunderfoot tribal elder, a man Lily loves and respects, knows that Lily is going to bring unmitigated horror upon the world the likes of which it has never seen.
One of the recurring themes of this blog is that G is the one who will bring about the apocalypse. So if G is the Devil, then Lily is Rosemary’s Baby. As of right now, there’s no direct link between the two, but since both have thematic ties to the earth, there likely will be a point where their stories cross.
However, it isn’t G that concerns me. He’s going to doom everyone and everything anyway, so he can take a backseat here. What I find extremely intriguing is that Lily’s story is actually about two different entities: Lily herself and the great wind spirit that she gives all the credit to.
That spirit’s name is Toyno’Ikonoi.
Something about the name of the spirit was eating at me, and I could tell just by looking at its structure that there was meaning to that name. I spent weeks researching it, and this research is the primary reason why it took me so long to write this article.
I started with the obvious, researching and Google Translating Japanese kanji. As someone pointed out to me, the name Toyno’Ikonoi was written in katakana, so I had to find the equivalent meaning in kanji form. I came up with 問いのいこの井, which, while a complete mess, nevertheless translated as “the well of questions.” Needless to say, this was going nowhere fast, and while the name Toyno’Ikonoi has a similar word cadence to the term Satsui no Hado (Toy-no-Ikonoi, Satsui-no-Hado), it didnt necessarily mean that the name originated from Japanese. Combined with the fact that Ikonoi is also the name of a Japanese idol band, it’s safe to say this wasn’t where I wanted to look.
From there, I looked up the languages of indigenous Mexican tribes, but none of the languages matched the grammar structure of Toyno’Ikonoi, and I found no direct translations. One of the results that kept being brought up when I searched the name Toyno’Ikonoi was that the word “ikonoi” meant “icon” in Russian, suggesting a possible link to JP. Indeed, JP does mention the Thunderfoot in his win quote to Lily:
“The Thunderfoot tribe? Ah, yes. Bison was quite fixated on the land they inhabit.”
However, since Lily really had no symbolic link to Eastern Europe, I knew there was no point to pursuing this, either. Eventually, after weeks of research and hitting dead end after dead end, I decided to look closer to home, and finally found what I was looking for. As it turns out, Capcom has a history of bringing in local references to their games, whether it’s Japan or the United States. Capcom USA is headquartered in San Francisco, and there are multiple native indigenous tribes nearby that originated in the San Joaquin Valley, with the Yokuts people being one of them. Within the Yokuts are smaller distinct tribes, including the Chukchansi and the Yawelmani, also known as the Yowlumne. I stumbled across several native language translators before finding an English-Yowlumni dictionary created by the Tule River Tribe of California. https://tulerivertribe-nsn.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/ENGLISH-YOWLUMNI-DICTIONARY.pdf
It was here that I finally found what I was looking for, and by cross-referencing with other sources, I was finally able to pinpoint what the name Toyno’Ikonoi meant. Toyno, or toi’no, is a shared word among the Yokuts, meaning “night” or “all night long”. Ikonoi, being the tricky word it is, had multiple parts. The suffix “-oi” describes a verb in the future tense. The base word is “kon”, from the word “kooninin”, meaning fall. Assuming the first letter I in “Ikonoi” is a transition, this means that Toyno’Ikonoi translates to “Night Will Fall.”
As I was writing this article, I revealed my findings to two people in my DMs on Twitter, one of whom immediately pointed out how this echoed Street Fighter V’s story, entitled “A Shadow Falls”.
It’s funny that I didn’t realize that.
Street Fighter Game Lore Theories 