Guilty Gear and The Universal Trans Experience
If I had a nickel for every time Guilty Gear reinterpreted a beloved (read: loathed) +R character as transgender I would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but with A.B.A and Zappa still to be revealed I think I stand to make a nice profit.
The reaction to Testament’s redesign didn’t shock me but it did confuse me. Apart from the 5-star facial feminisation surgery, Strive Testament is really not as much of a departure from their +R ancestor as some might have you believe. I won’t go into the details of pronouns in Japanese or the original Japanese text of the games because I would be lying to say my source is anything other than people on Twitter whose source is other people on Twitter. I can only point to what I see and what I see is +R Testament fighting in a crop top, skirt, and heels, and while the in-game sprites give them this square tombstone face that puts Guile to shame it’s clear from Daisuke’s art he was picturing Castlevania’s Alucard and not Castlevania’s Frankenstein.
Did Daisuke envision Testament as non-binary 20 years ago? Hard to say. While non-binary wasn’t the word of the day there was certainly plenty of people at the time exploring non-traditional gender identities, especially in the counter-culture scenes whose influence permeates Guilty Gear. On the other hand the Visual Kei inspirations are so obvious it’s a shock GACKT hasn’t sued, and if you’ll excuse me temporarily reviving decades old Tumblr discourse GACKT’s views on gender are still in the “men should die in war women should die of melancholy” stage, he’s not a gender pioneer he just looks hot in eyeliner. I can’t know Daisuke’s intentions, but when I look at how he draws Testament and compare it to how he draws male characters, even the more androgynous ones like Ky, there’s a distinction there that feels clear. It’s hard to articulate. While this period predates Daisuke’s descent into muscle worship his male characters are all various flavours of beefcake that are contrasted by Testament’s softness, but softness isn’t a concrete quality that you can use to project some notion of gender on something. Softness is just the closest physical concept I can get to the real word I want to use. Familiarity.
Daisuke through skill or chance or a deeply repressed desire to wear leather clothing created a Testament that trans people recognise as trans. Each portrait of Testament expresses such different emotions. Anxiety, sensuality, anger. But it’s the first of the portraits that really stood out to me, perhaps the most out of any of the Guilty Gear art. Testament’s tall skinny frame standing a little hunched over, staring at their hand with a smile on their face. It’s beautiful and delicate and like the other portraits it adds to this intricate conflict of emotions and appearances. In the title when I refer to a Universal Trans Experience I’m being a little facetious. In any group there exists a common experience and a desire by some people to enshrine that common experience as the universal experience and define the group by it. Cis men do it to trans men, cis women do it to trans women, trans people in turn do it to non-binary people. The only true Universal Trans Experience, the only true universal experience for any group really, is that life is complex. Being transgender is complex. And trans people see themselves reflected in complex characters like Testament more than they ever could in four portraits of Sol looking macho or Ky looking angsty. Trans Testament works not because they look like a slutty Hellsing OC (although it helps), they work because Testament is a character that embodies conflict and change and growth, the core values of transition. Testament’s redesign feels to me, and to other trans people, like Daisuke taking a natural next step in the character’s arc. Trans people are not always experts on sexuality and gender. My interest in the subject starts and ends at the bits I need for personal fufillment. What trans people are experts in is their own lives, and I think if you have experienced transition and all the nuances that come with it, if you have that mountain of extra context that other people don’t, then a character you relate to is a good trans character. If you want to be cynical and say it was the work of a marketing team I can’t stop you. But a marketing team didn’t write the story or draw the art and in there you’ll always find what makes Testament what they are.
Now Bridget… Bridget was a shock. Even on the gameplay front Bridget’s whole archetype didn’t seem to mesh with “the ground based footsies Guilty Gear is known for”. I’m a lot less charitable to the gameplay redesigns of Strive than the visual ones and Bridget felt like one they would have to avoid lest they be accused of butchering everyone’s favourite character they’ve never played. I’m not kidding. Bridget might be everyone’s first choice on the surveys but I still think it was bold to add her. Even visually there was a real worry she was going to fall victim to the steroid concoction Daisuke was slipping into everyone’s water bottles. All in all she’s made it through relatively unscathed. For once I might have to agree with the faceless anime profile pics on Twitter, Bridget’s change in gender could actually be the biggest thing worth talking about in her redesign.
re still going to jailWho is Bridget and why are so many people glad/mad/sad/down bad? How dare you ask me that. In short, to avoid a tradition of same-sex twins being murdered Bridget’s parents raise her as a girl despite being born male. They feel guilty about the whole arrangement and Bridget tries her best to be a good daughter to make them happy. Ultimately when this doesn’t work she gets the idea that it’s the society around them that needs to change and that by going off into the world and becoming a successful man she will prove the village wrong and make her parents proud.
Bridget is super endearing. She’s sweet and naive but still confident and assertive. In XX she’s given a bunch of fake bounties that she blindly trusts and leads her to fighting certified monsters. In Accent Core she decides to follow her dream of being an entertainer and gushes to everyone about how talented they are and why they should join her. My favourite part is easily when Chipp asks her to help make him president of Zepp and she tries to convince him that if he performs with her everyone will be so impressed they’ll make him president on the spot. She’s not trying to trick him she really believes that’s how things work. She’s a gem.
There’s a perception that gender is a very integral part of Bridget’s story but when you look at her interactions with other characters that’s not really the case. Plenty of characters assume she’s a girl and she tells them she’s in fact male but the most she goes into her reasons is the classic “it’s a long story”. Her win quote against Baiken is “This is what people call masculinity! I’ve been longing for someone like you. Can you teach me how to be unladylike?” shows she’s trying to pursue masculinity, but her ideal masculinity is still in the body of a woman. This is really as far as the games get on the subject. Bridget’s gender identity is not explored in a meaningful way. It’s a classic fighting game, any story it has is told through a series of random chance encounters and a dozen lines of exchanged dialogue. It doesn’t lend itself to that sort of character introspection and it doesn’t have to. My point here is that Bridget’s identity is not the focus of her character and interpretations of how she feels about her identity are just that: interpretations. I’m not making this point to then argue why one interpretation should be held over the others or the equally tedious all interpretations are valid approach. What I want is to discuss how the mainstream view of Bridget came to be, how it relates to other similar characters, and why some people have such a strong opposition to these characters being seen as transgender.
Oh god now I’m explaining Naoto in my article about Guilty Gear. Really really quick this time: Persona is a story about repressed feelings manifesting as monsters. Naoto resents being born a woman due to the sexism she faces and begins presenting as a man. Ultimately to defeat the monster she rejects her internalised prejudice and vows to work towards being respected without hiding who she is.
There’s a lot of nuance to Naoto’s story that I’m glossing over but the relevant part is this: trans people love Naoto. That might be confusing reading the paragraph above. To non-trans people, Naoto’s story and Bridget’s story and tons more like them in JP media (don’t get me started on trans rep in the west it’s honestly worse), read like rejections of being trans. In Naoto’s case it could not be more literal. Her inner soul comes to life and tells her she doesn’t really want to be trans. Why then are trans people so insistent that Naoto IS trans? A lot of where the anger and backlash comes from is the idea that people who see Naoto or Bridget as trans either don’t understand the story or are willfully ignoring it. I get it. If I poured 80 hours into Persona 4 and then had to read character discussions by people who seemed to be missing a major plot point I’d probably assume they’re posers who only watched the Hiimdaisy comic dub and vow to make fun of them at every opportunity. Suspend your disbelief that we actually care about the things we talk about, it’s tough I know, and let me explain.
Naoto and Bridget are part of a trope in JP media I call “gender as a symptom”. With characters like these their troubles with gender are tied to issues in their life, and their character arc presupposes that overcoming these issues will solve the issue of their gender as well. This trope is so common that it forms the basis of what a lot of people understand gender issues to be. Let me be a little vulnerable and a little indulgent here. I was 16 when I learned what transgender meant. I learned from people like Scarlett and Ricki Ortiz. Since I was 10 I had a secret bag of girls clothes stashed in my room and I had felt like a freak every day right up until I learned that word. And I wished on a star that I could be like that too. That I could be honest about what I wanted. And so I took little steps. I grew my hair out, I tried out being a girl on MMOs, and I used the magic of the internet to try and get help. Where did it lead me? At age 19 I had an undercut, a wardrobe full of ugly Hollister t-shirts, and a gym membership I used 3 days a week to squat a respectable 100kg and bench a pitiful 50kg. Because I had become aware of the idea of “gender as a symptom”. My feelings towards my body and my gender were not me wanting to be a woman, they were a symptom of shortcomings in other aspects of my life. These feelings I had were so painful that the only recourse seemed to be fixing every issue I could find in my life. So that’s what I went about doing. I tried harder at school, I tried harder with my friends, I was exercising more, eating better, I was a model of success. And I wasn’t happy. My accomplishments felt nice. I can’t deny the addictive quality of picking up heavy things and putting them back down. Those little boosts would carry me through to the next month or week. But it wasn’t making me happy. People were noticing my efforts and encouraging me and I always felt so guilty because their compliments tasted like ash in my mouth. I was doing what I was supposed to. Why was it still raining?
Gender isn’t a symptom. I want to say it never is. None of my efforts ever made my feelings go away. I was transgender. And even accepting that didn’t get me to stop fighting it. Being trans is scary. I would have taken any other way out and I was sure I just had to look in the right place to find it. That’s why I see transness in these characters who reject it. Because I rejected it. Because I said the words they did every day and cried every night. Because if my story was the one being written that’s where they would have cut it off. But there’s so much more. More than I ever imagined. Maybe not for everyone. Maybe you solved your gender identity issues with gummy vitamins or buying a lizard or shooting a gun or whatever and never questioned anything again. But I only have my life, and I see it in the characters that want so badly to be normal. Who convince themselves they’ve figured it out. Is it selfish to wonder what it might look like if their next steps followed mine? Is it selfish to want it to be that way? To want them to stumble and struggle and find that there’s happiness outside the bounds of normal. To feel that’s what’s right for them. Is it selfish to resent a fiction having what you couldn’t?
If there ever was or ever could be a Universal Trans Experience, I think you would find it in the denial of being trans.
Bridget’s redesign is special to me. I didn’t think it would be when I first saw it. I wrote it off. They changed her pronouns who cares. But I keep relistening to that damn song. I keep watching that damn video. I lived in a permissive home. My sister is gay, my mum was a goth right down to the green mohawk. If I had came out at 16 I probably would have been accepted. If I had told someone my feelings at 10 I probably would have been helped. But I couldn’t. Nobody was putting pressure or expectations on me personally, but I could see them in the world around me. No one told Bridget she had to be a man. But no one told her it was okay to be a girl either. Her parents’ guilt makes her feel there’s something wrong with what she is but there’s no one she can ask to tell her why they feel that way. All she really knows is she’s different. And when she looked to the world to tell her what she should be doing she came to the same conclusions I did. When she followed those conclusions to the end she found herself in the same place that I was. “Making Bridget trans is saying that men can’t be feminine”. Sure they can. I was a feminine man once. So was Bridget. And maybe that’s the right fit for you. It wasn’t for me. It wasn’t for Bridget. I don’t want to assign some sort of free will to her here. Ultimately she’s a product of Daisuke’s pen. She’s a set of neuron activations in his brain. Bridget as a character existed at a crossroads and Daisuke picked a path. And you can regret the paths not taken. That’s okay. Maybe your Bridget was as important to you as this one is to me. I’m glad he picked this one. It means a lot to me, as embarrassing as it is to say that.
What’s my point in all this?
I don’t want you to come away from this thinking “trans person likes trans characters”. That’s not news, and honestly considering some of the terrible trans characters I’ve seen over the years it’s not true either. The message isn’t “Testament and Bridget are cool” either, cause while that is true, it’s a bit narrow.
What I’m trying to say here is that transition changes your life. It’s wonderful and painful in equal measure. In the past 5 years I’ve experienced joys the heights of which I never imagined were possible. I’ve experienced pits of sadness that felt all-consuming. There is no media out there that does any justice to what transition really is. There’s no media out there that does justice to gender identity issues or dysphoria or any of these things. I mean I don’t think anything even comes close. The words don’t exist. The images wouldn’t make sense. When trans people speak about transness in characters they’re speaking with a context that just isn’t available to other people. And what I’m trying to convey to you is how drastically that context changes your perception. When trans people talk about Testament or Bridget or Naoto or Astolfo or Felix or Haruhi or Luka or Maria or Haku or Totsuka or Chihiro or whatever godforsaken character comes next, understand that traits you see as contradictory to the trans experience might really be things that are integral to the trans experience. That often transition is a process of untangling countless complex and contradictory ideas. Understand that maybe neither of us can see through the other’s eyes. We’re all informed by the context of our own lives. The best we can do is explain what we see and why we see it. And lastly understand that there are a million trans experiences out there. Some will line up with what you know. Some will sound messy. Some bizarre. Some foreign. But while there’s no Universal Trans Experience, we recognise trans experiences in each other and we recognise them in characters. If you feel a character’s transition doesn’t make sense or was too sudden or, god forbid, might be pandering, look to the people in your life who have experienced it. If you don’t have any trans people in your life, you can usually find us on the internet. Just avoid the reddit users, the /tttt/ users, the tiktok users, the picrew avis, the nintendo avis, girls called Alice, guys called Aiden, and absolutely anyone chooses to spend the beautiful second chance at life called transition getting mad at shit on the internet. Listen to the people who write 3000 word articles about shit on the internet instead, they’ve really got this whole life thing on lock.
Peace and love
