Most of the Guilty Gear community was just going about their day, potentially enjoying some of the recent changes made to the rollback netcode beta for Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2. Then, series creator Daisuke Ishiwatari decided it was time to drag out a toxic part of the community that can’t stop being terrible to others.
Ever since Bridget was announced as a DLC character for Guilty Gear Strive at Evo 2022, the topic of gender identity and representation has been a sticking point within the GG and wider video game community due to the yo-yo slinger discovering she was much more comfortable living as a woman than a man in the game.
Just like with any similar type of reveal, a vocal portion of the fanbase tried to fight back against this ideal or push down people who resonated and celebrated Bridget’s acceptance after years of struggling with her gender and sense of self.
Daisuke and other members of the dev team would eventually shut down that response by definitively stating the correct pronoun for Bridget is “she” during a developer backyard post.
Even after that very direct statement, there was still pushback. Now, Daisuke has once again cemented that Bridget identifies as a woman by confirming this was always part of his plan for her story in an interview with Japanese publication NEWS DIG.
“The ending of the story itself was decided when Bridget first appeared in the game, and the direction itself has not changed,” Daisuke said.
Strive’s game director Akira Katano backed Daisuke up immediately, noting he had never strayed from the vision the series’ creator put in place from the very start.
“I never changed the storyline with a whim. It’s not just about Bridget, but the message of the character and the drama has been decided for a long time,” Katano said. “Nowadays, transgender people are much more widely recognized, and it seems like the times have caught up with Bridget’s story, which we had been thinking about for a long time.”
Unfortunately, that story was treated as the focal point of hate and mistreatment online and it resulted in Arc System Works, and specifically the GG team, needing to publicly make a statement.
From the start, the team knew Bridget coming back was a way to please fans since she was a popular character and that the reveal of her gender identity would “have pros and cons,” but that didn’t matter to the staff.
Originally, the team wanted to just say “play the game, accept the story, and take our message as it is” despite the various interpretations for different people. But once it became something being discussed and used in bad faith by even those who had not purchased or played the game, ArcSys had to step in.
“We discussed the need to make an official announcement at an internal meeting and then made an announcement. The biggest factor was that the biggest problem was not clarifying what the ‘official intention was, rather than which was better,’” Daisuke said.
“The users look at it from the stance that ‘it is your company that is creating the spark,’ and there is a very loud voice saying, ‘I don’t care how it turns out, just make it clear what the official conclusion is.’”
In fact, the main concern for some of the team was more about the story being spoiled to an extent with the statement rather than a debate about how to phrase things, though even this response won’t stop the continued “discussions.”
Daisuke specifically mentions how his goal early on with Guilty Gear was to set up characters “who were in a minority position” and place them into his series in a way that will help create an image of those people as heroic characters.
The best part of this? This info was purposefully released on Bridget’s birthday too!
Daisuke and Katano also discuss multiple other aspects of Bridget’s character, including that her yo-yo-centric design was decided on due to Daisuke’s encounter with someone who he met and showed him a lot of tricks and that she keeps coming back because she is popular, not necessarily for story reasons.
Additionally, a bit of insight into the deeper themes in Guilty Gear’s story were shared, with a focus on incomplete humans who can’t accept themselves, which you can read here.
Published: Oct 26, 2022 08:28 pm