On June 14, 2024, Arc System Works, through their American branch announced a collaboration with Sanzigen Studios to produce an anime adaptation of Guilty Gear -Strive-, titled Dual Rulers.
Given the blatant censorship plaguing the Guilty Gear franchise in its latest installment where characters have been stripped of their original, provocative designs in favor of sanitized, inoffensive revisions to appease the so-called “male gaze”, I knew from the start that nothing good would come of this abomination.
Sanzigen’s Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers anime is now set to premiere in April 2025, as confirmed in a newly released main trailer. The trailer explores the story following the events of the Guilty Gear Strive game, offering a closer look at Unika (a new character set to join Guilty Gear Strive this spring) and several returning characters, one of whom has arguably become more prolific than the very franchise he belongs to.
For the past couple of years, social media has been ablaze over a single addition to Guilty Gear Strive’s roster—none other than Bridget. This effeminate bounty hunter has a backstory that is both tragic and compelling.
Born male, Bridget was forcibly raised as a girl due to village superstitions surrounding twins, believing that one of them would bring misfortune. Determined to prove his worth and break the stigma surrounding his birth, he left the village to become a bounty hunter, hoping that by achieving fame and fortune, he could one day return and demonstrate that his existence as a man would not bring disaster upon his people.
Despite his rather feminine appearance, something he fully embraced as what the Japanese refer to as an “otokonoko” Bridget has always identified as male since his introduction in Guilty Gear XX.
Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end. In today’s society, we’ve seen a surge in transgender ideology, deranged people who believe they can defy biological reality and identify as the opposite sex. And, as always, the casualties of this movement end up being digital media and entertainment, particularly fictional characters like Bridget, who was originally a “femboy” or what the western anime fans commonly refer to as a “trap.”
We’ve already seen this trend with the retconning of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, where so-called “problematic” dialogue was revised, and an entire character was rewritten to fit into this modern fantasy, reframing a clearly effeminate male as trans.
With Arc System Works now operating as a full-fledged corporate entity eager to push diversity and inclusivity, Guilty Gear -Strive- has subjected itself to ideological activists who despise fanservice, convinced that female characters with breasts are inherently objectified. They even went so far as to impose censorship on the game’s digital figure mode, preventing players from positioning characters in provocative poses for photos.
And when Arc System Works brought Bridget back into Guilty Gear Strive in 2022, they did so at a cost, his identity.
Arc System Works operates two additional branches outside of Japan—one in America and a recently established European division. As has become the norm in the gaming industry over the past several years, neo-Marxist ideology has increasingly embedded itself into game development in America.
In line with this trend, Guilty Gear Strive’s English localization opted to reframe Bridget, who has always been a classic “femboy” as a trans woman, all based on a single in-game line spoken after a losing streak.
Years of established lore, of course, meant nothing to the kind of people who play Strive. Like many other fighting games that have sold their soul to the pedophilic inhabitants of the Western Fighting Game Community, Strive has embraced prolific censorship and blatant trans pandering.
The English localization deliberately butchered and mistranslated Bridget’s dialogue, twisting his character beyond recognition. For all intents and purposes, Arc System Works’ American division has retconned Bridget into being a girl, sparking endless debates over the nearly three years he has been in Strive, a game that, at this point, is all but dead.
Naturally, the goal of this anime adaptation is to reignite interest in the franchise, drive sales, and bring in new players. With Guilty Gear -Strive- now struggling at a mere ~2,000 peak concurrent players on Steam, a massive drop from its 31,000 peak at launch it’s clear that Arc System’s decision to cater to the Western vocal minority has backfired.
But will they backtrack on their allegiance to diversity and inclusivity? Of course not.
Their rejection of fanservice, especially in the case of characters like Baiken, alienated longtime fans, and consumer interest has long since collapsed in the wake of the Bridget debacle.
Unfortunately for longtime Guilty Gear fans and anyone with a grip on reality Arc System Works has doomed us to another three years of endless discourse over Bridget’s supposed “identity.” The infamous yo-yo-wielding bounty hunter makes an appearance in the trailer for GUILTY GEAR STRIVE: DUAL RULERS, an anime set after the events of Strive.
The story picks up following the defeat of Happy Chaos and I-No, with Ky Kiske and Dizzy seeking to finally marry. However, because Dizzy is a half-Gear, a race of magical beings originally created to advance human evolution but later repurposed as weapons of war, their union is seen as unnatural and controversial. Their wedding is interrupted by Unika, a human girl determined to prevent the marriage and exterminate all Gears.
Alongside Ky, Dizzy, and Unika, several Guilty Gear veterans join the cast, including Sol Badguy (who appears to have regained some of his power after losing the Flame of Corruption in Strive), Sin Kiske (Ky and Dizzy’s son), Jack-O’, Johnny, Bridget, Baiken, Elphelt Valentine, Ramlethal Valentine, Leo Whitefang, and Vernon E. Groubitz.
While the primary storyline follows Ky, Dizzy, and Sin as they attempt to stop Unika from reigniting the Crusades, a century-long war between humans and Gears the rest of the cast will embark on their own adventures that tie into the larger narrative. Most returning characters will be voiced by their Strive Japanese actors, with the exception of Vernon, who will now be portrayed by Junichi Endo.
However, one glaring issue remains. Just as Strive’s English localization deliberately twisted the game’s official dialogue to push a transgender narrative, Dual Rulers’ official website appears to be engaging in the same deceptive practice.
The site features descriptions of the anime’s cast alongside their respective voice actors, but once again, Bridget’s English profile deviates from the Japanese version, continuing the forced ideological rewriting of his character.
In the English version of the official webpage for the upcoming anime adaptation set to air in April, Bridget is described as having “questioned” his “identity,” with his experiences throughout Guilty Gear’s lore supposedly helping him discover “her” own path, outright identifying him as a woman.
In other words, they’ve once again rewritten him as trans.
The Japanese version of the webpage presents a slightly different description:
“世界中を旅する賞金稼ぎ。出自から「自分らしさ」について思い悩むこともあったが、旅でのさまざまな出会いを経て自分の生き方を見つけた。”
This roughly translates to: “A bounty hunter who travels the world. They once struggled with their sense of self due to their origins, but through various encounters during their journey, they found their own way of life.”
Notably, the Japanese text avoids using any explicit gendered terminology, which raises concerns. This could suggest that the retconning of Bridget from male to a transgender woman has extended even to the core of the anime adaptation.
The lack of gendered pronouns might imply an intentional ambiguity or even an attempt to frame Bridget as being transgender upon the Japanese. Though that may be a stretch, it’s hard to ignore the deliberate vagueness in how he is described.
Whether the retconning of Bridget has fully taken hold in Japan remains uncertain, but considering Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers was a collaborative effort involving Arc System Works’ American division, there’s little reason to be optimistic.
What is clear, however, is that Bridget is once again being incorrectly labeled as a woman in the official English version of the anime’s website. This misrepresentation stems entirely from a single mistranslated line in the game’s English localization, further highlighting the disconnect between Japan and the West.
Thanks to the West’s insatiable need to police everything, Japan’s animation industry is being reshaped right before our eyes, all in the name of profit. The flood of foreign money has led studios to bend over backwards to meet Western social standards, and the results are painfully obvious.
Modern adaptations are being censored left and right, some even retroactively, character designs are being sanitized, bust sizes are shrinking, and God forbid a petite character shows too much skin.
Gone are the days of unapologetic ecchi, now, Japan is quietly phasing out anything remotely erotic, with visible nipples on the chopping block. And who’s spearheading this crusade? None other than Sony (and Kadokawa), because nothing screams cultural enrichment like forcing Japan to adopt Western “diversity and inclusivity” mandates under the guise of global standards.
Thanks to companies like Crunchyroll, owned by Sony and infamous for its rogue localizations that stray from the original Japanese script to inject politics, gender-neutral terminology, and Western slang anime has experienced a massive influx of new viewers (and profit) from the West who demand censorship and consume media through a sociopolitical lens.
This has led to cases where characters are forcibly reinterpreted as transgender, particularly if they fall into the categories of cross-dressers, traps, or otokonoko. The niche Japanese concept of effeminate male characters who resemble or could be mistaken for female counterparts is being systematically erased by Western activists who twist existing franchises to fit their ideological narratives.
Rather than respecting the original material, they seek to corrupt and reshape it to validate their own modern fantasies, just as racist Black people on social media ethnically erase Japanese characters to align with their personal identities under the guise of “representation” and then feign innocence whenever artwork featuring tanned characters is depicted with slightly lighter shades, as if any minor variation is an unforgivable offense, but not before bombarding them with threats.
What will come from this Guilty Gear anime adaptation is anyone’s guess, though it’s likely to go one of two ways. With transgender Redditors asserting that Bridget is trans, we can expect Twitter to be flooded with retarded ramblings surrounding “Brisket,” only to be shut down by those who’ve fallen for the engagement bait and are bluntly setting the record straight.
The anime might momentarily breathe new life into Guilty Gear -Strive-, though it’s unlikely to reach the same level of success or widespread popularity that Cyberpunk 2077 enjoyed following its Edgerunners anime adaptation on Netflix even with Bridget discourse expected to go viral.
Alternatively, the anime adaptation is likely to fall flat and fail to generate any significant consumer interest in purchasing the game. This scenario mirrors what happened with Blue Archive’s anime adaptation, which aired a year before Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers. Despite its release, Blue Archive saw no meaningful uptick in sales, proving that not every anime tie-in automatically boost interest and revenue for its franchise.
Either way, Arc System Works hasn’t just stuck with their cancerous Western outfit they’ve actively allowed it to proliferate, effectively killing the Guilty Gear franchise with relentless censorship and the infamous English-only trans retconning of Bridget. At this point, Arc System Works has likely squandered millions producing this anime, only for it to fail to generate a worthwhile return, which, honestly, would be a well-deserved outcome.
