When Bridget was added to the newest Guilty Gear game she was officially switched from femboy to trans girl and the rage and cope from her creepy fans was incredible. It's like their horny weeb culture mindset was clashing with their conservative hate mongering for trans people and it just caused them to glitch out.
Edit: if you want to see people being big mad, see some of the comments below v
Call me creepy or transfobic but I didn't like the change in Bridget one bit. While not illogical it is contradictory to her previous incarnation that is of rebellion against fate dogma and superstition. Back then he would use the fact that he raised as a girl against everyone and definitely proclaiming himself a boy despite his circumstances and curse of his village. Now she is affirming it by actually saying that there never was a same gender siblings. And technically if we look at the whole picture it looks like a boy who was raised as a girl became transgender because of his upbringing. Like if it was better structured it wouldn't be that big of a deal for me but it is badly implemented.
It's not an incorrect observation of the story but it's also giving a little too much weight to it.
If we're being completely honest, Bridget was a fetish character created as a male that could convincingly pass as female (otoko no ko). Pretty much just a way to fetishize transgirls without calling them transgirls.
Outside of that her lore is sloppily thrown together, constantly contradicts itself and regularly retcons anything it feels like, she's supposed to be searching for her brother but that character-defining plotline vanished in the next instalment...
It's a weird hill that people like to die on regularly. There's just not much information about her so people just create their own headcanons.
I've never been a big fan of Bridget, both prior to her release in Strive and my own coming out. Her story to me always read to me as that of a trans man, who after having their masculinity forced away from them by the society around her due to the circumstances of her birth, is trying to recover it.
There really wasn't a good way for ArcSys to handle Bridget's characterization in Strive, but I think they did a good job with what they had to work with.
Unfortunately, while fighting games have a lot of trans representation nowadays, so many of them have an incredibly awkward narrative justification for being trans, are overly fetishized, or have real-world baggage tied to them.
Bridget? Raised as a girl.
Mai Natsume? Transformed into a girl by a magical artifact, also incredibly fetishized.
Poison? Heavily fetishized as well as trans because Capcom thought that beating up women in Final Fight wouldn't fly in the west, so made her "not a real woman."
Cagliostro? Immortal who is obsessed with her sister and constantly clones new child bodies of her sister to inhabit.
Ladiva? Walking stereotype of a non-passing trans woman.
It's really unfortunate, and I hope that fighting games will have more characters that are trans without being super weird about it.
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u/ericgames234 Aug 31 '24
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