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Update: In honor of our upcoming season a new mini-episode focused on this piece is up. Listen to it above, or hit up iTunes and Spotify to subscribe to the podcast!
Meet Flyod Araia. The newest addition to Streets of Rage 4. He’s a beefy boy ready for an alleyway brawl. Flyod also happens to have both arms adorned in powerful metal. He joins a long lineage of super black folks who have optionally (or forcibly) swapped flesh for alloy.
Black characters with metal arms have become a trope. If your black superhero doesn’t have a shiny metal arm, they better be slinging lightning at someone. The metal arms of men and women denote power, resilience, and strength. All qualities a superhero needs and a supervillain relishes.
I kept trying to find a deeper meaning behind the removal of black people’s arms. You could skew negative and comment on making black people less human by replacing their body parts with cold machinery. But who wants to think like that, right? In the end, the metal limbs are black people’s inherent power manifested in the most physical of manners. By turning their frail flesh to unbreakable metal, you make them more. You make them Super.
Also, it looks dope as hell. So it’s time for…
Black Characters With Metal Arms
Here is a nice list of powerful characters of color (shoutout to the PCOC’s) who also have some type of metal arm.
Jax Briggs of Mortal Kombat Series
Jax holds the title of “THE Black Character With Metal Arms”
Jackson Briggs is probably the most famous metal-armed black dude in the nerdy circles. Jax made a name for himself by ripping the limbs off his competitors in Mortal Kombat. His raw power coupled with his cybernetic enhancements allows Jax to create seismic shocks when he bashes the ground. In the most recent run of the Mortal Kombat games, we were introduced to his daughter Jacqui. She aims to follow in dad’s footsteps, adorning cybernetic arm gauntlets that increase her power and ferocity.
Floyd Iraia: Streets of Rage 4
Metal arms AND electricity? Doubling down eh?
Floyd is the new co-op player in the upcoming Streets of Rage 4 video game. Following in Jax’s footsteps, both of Floyd’s immensely large arms are cybernetic. He may be great at punching but I’ll be damned if he could do a crossword puzzle with those big ass mitts. No pencil on earth can withstand those fingers.
He also seems to have a taser packed into those heavy hammers he calls arms. Guess he meets all-black superhero criteria. Metal arms. Check. Lightning powers. Check.
Barret Wallace: Final Fantasy 7
The original himself
Here comes “The man with a gun for a hand”. Barret Wallace, Final Fantasy 7’s resident gruff-talking eco-terrorist. After losing his right arm in a tragic cliffhanger style accident, Barret grafted a Gattling gun to his ruined arm. So you know he makes good decisions.
In the follow-up film Final Fantasy Advent Children, Barret is given a full robotic arm, with a hand and everything. It has the ability to elaborately transform into a much larger, four-barrel, rotating Gatling gun with some kind of fusion canon in the center. He also got cornrows and a bubble jacket. I can’t help think he’s stuntin’ on someone. That gun upgrade is definitely like a rapper buying 4 really expensive cars with their first million.