Turning the gray haze into sky blue
CONTENT WARNING: mentions and discussions of transphobia and transphobic caricatures
(A screenshot of Bridget forcing a smile through a lot of physical pain)
If you hang around in any queer spaces online you've probably seen Bridget, she's immensely popular among trans women, and there's lots of fanart of her everywhere, in fact many people don't even know a lot about her, they just know what she looks like cause she's hard to avoid, and I think I have some thoughts on not only why I like her as a character but also why she's so popular (there's some things I don't love about the character but I won't talk about it here cause I want this post to be more of a celebration of her as a character than anything else).
SIDENOTE: I only got into Guilty Gear recently but I hyperfixated on this character earlier this year so... take this whole thing with a grain of salt I guess, it's more of an opinion piece than anything, I'm sorry if I get some facts wrong here and there, I'll try not to.
Bridget is a fairly popular character in the fighting game series "Guilty Gear", when she was first introduced she started off as... let's face it: a transphobic caricature, the infamous "trap" character archetype, if you don't know what that is don't worry about it, ignorance is bliss sometimes.
In earlier Guilty Gear games Bridget identified as a boy and corrected people when they mistook her for a girl, she would even talk about how she wants to be more masculine at times. The reason she dresses and speaks so femininely is because in the lore of the game she was actually raised as a girl, and, ok, this next part is kinda wacky but stay with me for a second ok?
So Bridget was born in a town in England (yes I know, tragic, she is in fact bri'ish) that has a superstition against male twins, this is taken so seriously that when male twins are born the youngest one is meant to be put to death or given up for adoption, and since her parents didn't want to lose Bridget they raised her as a girl, hiding her assigned gender at birth from everyone. So she's used to being feminine because that's how she was raised to be, but still thinks she is a boy and wants to be more manly to like, prove her town wrong? And make her parents feel less guilty over imposing femininity on her? Or something? I don't really get it I'm not going to lie.
Bridget doesn't show up in every Guilty Gear game, and she's never been the most relevant character to the main plot of the game, in fact I'm under the impression she's one of the weakest characters in the canon, so she probably wouldn't be able to hold a candle to the main antagonists and stuff, and despite that I also hear she's always been voted as one of the most popular characters in the franchise.
Bridget was popular enough that she was referenced in "The Impossible Quiz" which was a pretty crude flash game from 2007, the question "Bridget makes everyone..." with the correct answer being "gay" is a (transphobic) meme about her. If you don't get the "joke" then once again, ignorance is bliss.
Eventually the game "Guilty Gear Strive" came out, and since I'm an animation nerd let me go off-topic for a bit to talk about how insanely cool this game's visuals are, they managed to use 3D models to imitate a 2D anime look and it is, in my opinion, the best attempt at doing that I've ever seen, from a technical perspective it's incredibly impressive and pointlessly effortful, and from an aesthetic level I think genuinely it's one of the best looking games of all time, this game's visuals are a masterpiece. But ok back to Bridget.
So when the game launches she's not a part of it, and she also wasn't in the previous installment, but slowly they start introducing new playable characters as downloadable content, and one day she gets announced as an upcoming character, but suspiciously there are no pronouns or gendered language in any of the trailers or promotional materials for it, people don't seem to notice it but it was foreshadowing (they also redesigned the character but I'll get back to that later).
When she comes out and people start playing her arcade mode they find out that her story is unexpectedly queer, it's about accepting herself and being truthful to who she is, and there is a whole scene where she actually says the actual words "because...I'm a girl", and no, it's not a translation thing, in Japanese she says "内は……女の子ですから" (uchi wa... onnanoko desu kara) which – when translating as literally as I can – roughly means "because as for me (feminine) I'm a girl" (let's not get into the technicalities of it). Basically, from Guilty Gear Strive onwards she identifies as a girl despite being assigned male at birth, so she's literally a trans woman.
The Guilty Gear fandom was (is?) full on transphobes, so unfortunately there was quite a lot of backlash to this reveal, even today you can see people going out of their way to misgender Bridget every chance they get, I'll avoid talking about the transphobia too much but I thought I should mention that this is a big issue, half the time Bridget is even mentioned things devolve into insults and bigotry really quickly, it really does suck but it's not like we can do much about it so, moving on.
Let's focus on her character design first and then we'll go over a few other reasons why I like her and why she might resonate so much with people.
Back when she was first introduced into the franchise she was wearing (in my opinion) the weirdest outfit out of anyone, the character designs for this series are often over the top and goofy (and are often sexualized), but in her case she was literally wearing a very short nun dress that is blue with a male symbol on her forehead, and a gigantic handcuff around her waist (a waistcuff?), it seems pretty clear that her outfit was not really taking into account her lore or even her personality, it was trying to be out there and probably sexy? maybe? I'm not even sure, while also hinting at the fact she was meant to be a boy at the time, so overall I can't say I particularly like it.
When we look at her redesign, it's still fairly similar in vibes, even the color palette is not too different, but you can tell the people in charge of her design did their research and made it with love, because this is actually a thousand times more fitting for a trans woman.
For starters, while it still kinda looks like a nun outfit her top has actually been turned into a hoodie, and not just any hoodie, if you're a trans woman you may recognize this as a dysphoria hoodie, because it is literally meant to be one.
They actually did enough research to figure out what kinds of things Bridget might feel dysphoric about, one of those things is her hands, so the big puffy sleeves (and her black gloves) make her hands look smaller, the fact her hoodie is so big also hides her lack of curves on her upper body, the stuff she's wearing underneath also specifically covers her neck because she's dysphoric about her adam's apple as well, and the fact it's a pastel colored hoodie also goes well with how feminine she likes to present herself, like, this is a carefully thought out design, I was moved the first time I heard about this being a thing because you so rarely see this type of thing anywhere else, it's such a breath of fresh air.
Not only that but they gave her a black skater skirt (classic transfem item of clothing), they switched the male symbol on her forehead for a transgender one (a combined male and female symbol: ⚨), and she even has the word "growth" written on the crosses hanging off her sleeves.
Even without any context I think you should be able to tell the character is a trans woman if you stare at her design long enough, or at least it doesn't feel too surprising to find out she is one. And I won't go into it too much but like, they kinda sexualize most Guilty Gear characters in some way and the way they do it for her makes sense, and I think it's tasteful, I won't elaborate further on that though, make of that what you will.
NOTE: I don't remember where I read the stuff about her design taking into account the things that make her dysphoric so I can't corroborate that it's true, but even if it isn't the fact that the design can be read that way still rules honestly.
So I love her new design, and I think it also resonates with a lot of other people for the same reasons: we can tell it was done with love, there was effort put into it.
Not only that but her theme song hits pretty hard if you're trans, it's very relatable, from the denial of your own transness (why am I feeling so off? must be the vegetables I don't like, or the alarm clock I chose... couldn't be anything deeper right?) to the realization and acceptance of it, in particular these lines are really emotionally impactful:
I know who you are
I'm not leaving you again
Once you figure it out you never want to let go, this is who you were meant to be and the idea of repressing it once again is inconceivable, it is so joyful to finally get to be yourself, to "paint the gray haze into sky blue" as the song puts it.
I think the way Bridget is so stereotypically feminine (being afraid of bugs, liking cute things, carrying around a plushie, speaking in a feminine way) also makes it easy for us to project ourselves onto her and kinda view her as not just relatable but as something to aspire to, especially if we don't personally have the opportunity to have big 'ol plushies without our relatives or roomates suspecting anything, it's nice to see her getting to be so openly herself.
I even like the way she seems to have a very carefree attitude, there was a Guilty Gear Strive anime that released a few months ago and it is striking how positive and wholesome Bridget is throughout the whole thing. Considering how terrifying things can be in the real world and how most transfems suffer from mental health problems as a result it's really nice to see a portrayal of a trans woman in fiction being so relentlessly happy and unbothered.
I think the fact that the animation (and the visuals in general) of Guilty Gear Strive are so amazing also probably contributed to why I got hyperfixated on the character to be honest, the improvement between her older animations and the newer ones is astonishing and you can now see her personality reflected a lot better through the posing and the timing of her movements, genuinely as an animation nerd this game is a gold mine.
And lastly I wanted to bring something up I found pretty interesting. I remember thinking her backstory is kinda silly and makes her completely unrelatable, after all I think I speak for a lot of trans women when I say that if I had been raised as a girl I would've been pretty happy about it. I think one of the struggles most (if not all) trans women face is not being raised as the gender we are and instead being treated differently due to our assigned gender at birth, which is something Bridget somehow doesn't struggle with because she was raised as a girl, but is AMAB, and wanted to be more masculine for... reasons I don't fully understand, and then she does a 180 and ends up identifying as a woman anyway.
This was confusing to me and I remember wishing her backstory was a bit different, until I came across a post of someone talking about how relatable they find Bridget's story, cause as it turns out some trans women are pushed into femininity in a way that doesn't feel good.
It's common in certain queer spaces online to hear people speculating about other people's genders, saying things like "oh this person will totally come out as trans eventually" and things like that, which ends up making people feel pressured, like, yeah, they may enjoy femininity but it's almost as if their agency is being taken away from them, like they are not the ones who get to decide how and when to engage with this femininity.
In a weird way when people try to push someone to come out or embrace femininity it can resemble the way Bridget's parents treated her: imposing femininity because they think it's for the best, and so even though Bridget does want femininity it is not being given to her as a thing she can explore or has agency over, but as a command, a box to fit into, it is presented in a rigid way instead of the messy, fluid thing gender can be in reality, and that's one of the joys of being transgender, getting to explore what your gender means to you.
So despite her backstory being a bit weird it seems like there's people who can also find value in it and even relate to a certain extent, so I've come to appreciate that aspect of her character more.
Like I mentioned at the beginning, I don't think the character is perfect and I do have some gripes about her (mostly with the way the fandom treats her to be honest, but also some other details from the actual canon) but I think these are (some of) the reasons she's so popular, I know I certainly like the character and being able to see so much appreciation around her has been a wholesome experience, it makes me happy to see so many trans women feeling seen and represented.
I'm not much of a cosplay person but one day I do want to cosplay as Bridget.