I mean that a lot of gender norms and tropes, including for the space outside of heteronormativity, are culturally specific (because gender is a cultural construct, despite what bigots will tell you). You see a lot of those in a lot of very Japanese stuff that doesn’t really conform to western ideas of gender or…

I mean, I’m not gonna tell you how to feel, that’s a valid read, but they do take their time going through some of that in the story and setting up how she feels and why (I mean, in the time they have on a handful of pre-fight cutscenes, this is still a fighting game). Still, it doesn’t come out of nowhere.

I mentioned this above, didn’t know you had expanded upon it. Just to move it to the right place, Bridget isn’t remotely the only queer character in GG, they doubled down on Testament being nonbinary (and hired a trans voice actor to voice them), Baiken is still... Baiken and Venom is still extremely in-canon gay.…

No, seriously, don’t go to Reddit looking for this. It’s... bad.

I mean, that’s a fair point, but Bridget has sounded a specific way for a while, and I feel like they pre-empted this by actually hiring a trans VA for Testament instead.

I genuinely don’t know if that was a factor on Testament launching first, looking less binary and officially getting they/them pronouns in the English version, but either way it worked out that way and that’s pretty neat. Also pretty sure that’s why there’s a whole coming out arc in the game itself with plenty of…

Yeah. It’s very consistent with Testament in terms of them parsing a set of queer characters in a more... internationally compliant way, I guess?

Good stuff all around. The only caveat I saw that made some sense to me was that in terms of challenging dudebro perceptions of gender, pre-transition Bridget was probably more in-your-face, since you didn’t need to go into the deep lore to notice, but I don’t know that holds up to her getting a whole narrative…

Oh, hey, speaking of, GG Strive’s Bridget just hit today and her whole arcade mode narrative is about coming out as trans and switching to she/her pronouns.

Oh, wow, shit, yeah. Turns out I had commented on the thread, hence the “ringing a bell”, but the response in the comments was... pretty bad. Weird that they changed the text with an update note but they never acknowledged it in the comment dogpile. Time to block that ever happening in my mind again, I guess.

The loser bit is a bit of a joke, but the point I’m making is that the article makes it seem like Evo is just the top 8 when in reality everyone there beat a bunch of people to get to top 8 and didn’t lose the whole thing or come up last or whatever. They literally beat a bunch of people during Evo 2022.

No, it means he beat a bunch of people. Everyone except for 7 others, in fact.

I mean, Shanks came out joint last in top 8. I don’t think we’re at the stage where top 8 finishes in Evo count as “losing”, although maybe the competitive field for DBFZ has shrunk down enough by now. Here’s to that rollback patch.

Yup. I genuinely don’t understand how Americans parse ethnicity at all, let alone how they choose to name it or how flustered they can get when the real world doesn’t fonform to those categorizations.

Was that a thing? Do you have a link to that? It rings a bell, but I don’t remember it in quite those terms.

It’s part of the test to get your license.

Yeah, it’s been a weird hangup to try to make her a “first” since people noticed her. Street Fighter is nothing but cultural/regional/ethnic stereotypes from the jump. There’s been black Americans in it since day one (and I don’t mean SF2, I mean SF1), there’s been women since SF2, there’s been black women since SF3,…

Why is it odd to see a fighting game top the list? I don’t love everything about the Deck, but one of the best uses for it has been to grind practice mode or ranked matches in fighting games, at least in the ones that aren’t blocked by lack of compatibility or anti-cheat software.

I don’t know about you, but I am aware of multiple places where this “early access to a free thing by joining a Patreon” is very commonplace. The default, in fact. From Youtube videos to upcoming emulators and yes, mods and modding tools, a ton of creators give patrons or subscribers early access to content or beta…

This is not unexpected, but I’m having a hard time cutting through, ironically, the cultural divide in this conversation. You keep talking about this in such US-centric ways that it’s hard to even point out the parts that don’t play outside that context, or explain why.