It’s been a little over a month since Guilty Gear Strive showed Bridget coming to terms with her identity as a trans woman in the fighting game’s DLC, seemingly in an effort to interrogate the character’s complicated history regarding gender. And while the game itself was pretty clear, that hasn’t stopped the usual online suspects from trying to explain it away as a localization embellishment or just a mistranslation in general. After weeks of online debates and even some transphobes creating fake customer support emails to try and debunk Bridget’s identity, game directors Daisuke Ishiwatari and Akira Katano have confirmed, in no uncertain terms, that Bridget identifies as a trans woman and uses she/her pronouns.
In a Developer’s Backyard post on the Guilty Gear website, Ishiwatari and Katano spoke about Bridget’s identity in the context of her larger story. She was born into a village that had a superstition around same-gender twins, thus raised her as a girl to keep her safe. After she leaves the village, she becomes a successful bounty hunter and proves the superstition was baseless. After this she’s free to live her life as she chooses, and spends Guilty Gear Strive figuring out who she really is.
“After this, Bridget tries living as a man, but it doesn’t feel right,” Ishiwatari says. “This is where the Arcade Mode story begins. After she exchanges with Goldlewis and Ky, Bridget faces parts of herself she has tried to ignore, and makes a big decision for herself. I hope that all of you will watch over her path after her courageous choice to stay true to her own feelings.”
Katano also addressed one point of criticism often levied against Bridget’s story, which is she declares she is a woman in one of her arcade mode’s alternate endings. However, Katano says that just because these scenes play out in a different ending doesn’t mean what’s revealed in them isn’t canon. They’re just another means of showing more sides of the character.
“By the way, although the difficulty and story dialogue of Arcade Mode change depending on your match results, this doesn’t change the main plot, nor are there alternate endings such as “good” or “bad” endings,” Katano says. “The same goes for other characters’ Arcade stories as well. In general, these variations show other aspects of the characters.”
Ultimately, as much as I would love for this to be the definitive word and for transphobic babies to accept Bridget is a trans woman and live with it, there will still likely be people who claim this a mistranslation, a localization lie, or whatever they have to tell themselves to not believe Bridget is who she says she is. But hopefully this can offer some peace of mind to fans who enjoy the character and are happy to have some trans representation in Guilty Gear.
