Guilty Gear Strive Bridget confirmed to be a trans woman
Last weekend during EVO 2022, Guilty Gear Strive revealed Bridget was returning as a DLC character for Season 2. Bridget has been a fan-favourite ever since she debuted in Guilty Gear XX, whether it be because of her personality, her cute looks, or her skill with a yo-yo. This time around though, Guilty Gear Strive are going one step further by showcasing Bridget coming out as a trans woman.
Bridget has been a contentious character with a rocky history, largely in part due to her backstory and how other characters within Guilty Gear have treated her identity. Due to a superstition in her England hometown, parents who had twins of the same gender were expected to sacrifice one or throw them out into exile. Bridget’s parents didn’t want to do this, and so raised Bridget as a girl.
Despite growing up fairly happy, Bridget could see that her parents felt guilty about what they did and so took to the bounty hunting life to raise money. If successful, Bridget would return home and reveal to her town that the superstition around twins of the same gender was untrue.
With her identity being a huge part of her story, how the Guilty Gear universe has handled it hasn’t always been the best. However for Guilty Gear Strive, it looks as though Arc System Works are looking to not only improve how they’ve handled Bridget’s story in the past, but embrace Bridget as a trans girl – a major win for trans gamers and the overall LGBTQIA+ community.
The way Arc System Works has done this is through the storyline of her arcade route, where she speaks to characters Goldlewis and Kys about her insecurities and worries. Goldlewis points out that Bridget has been locking her real feelings away in order to keep those around her comfortable, but all that its really done is cause her strife. Both Kys and Goldlewis continue to comfort Bridget and tell her to take a positive stance in regards to her future, convincing Bridget to be true to who she really is: a girl.
Bridget herself confirms her identity when Goldlewis scolds himself on calling her a cowgirl, and instead calls her a cowboy. Bridget corrects him, saying: “Cowgirl is fine… Because I’m a girl!”
As pointed out by Fanbyte, Bridget’s coming out storyline as a trans girl had been datamined before the official reveal, with several pieces of dialogue revealing more about Bridget’s mindset of her identity, and how that’s directly changed over time. Not only does this dialogue show no contradiction of how Guilty Gear portrayed Bridget in previous games, but acknowledges how Bridget’s pursuit of masculinity actually only caused her further strife.
Bridget also isn’t the only LGBTQ+ character in Guilty Gear Strive, with goth hottie Testament confirmed as canonically non-binary last year.
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