Celebrating Queerness in Fighting Games

I love fighting games. And I love Queer people. Happy Pride Month, y’all (that is, if I manage to get this article out while it’s still June, otherwise, uh, happy Pride Month 2). 

I’ve met most of my Queer friends, either directly or indirectly, through the fighting game community. I suppose that’s not very surprising when some of the most well-known figures in the scene — Sonicfox, Romolla, Umisho — are loudly and proudly LGBTQ+, or when the genre has so many iconic Queer characters to offer. While some of this can be attributed to general societal change or to transgender people’s famed ability to press buttons really well, I do think that there is something about fighting games that makes them particularly well-suited as a medium for LGBTQ+ representation and expression. 

One important facet is a connection between identity and gameplay that was established in one of the first-ever fighting games, Street Fighter II. The game sought to appeal to as many arcade-goers as possible and provide a complex and strategic gameplay experience, which meant that having a large (for the time) and diverse roster was key. This was a time when having unique playable characters was, while not unheard of, pretty uncommon. So, to ease players into the idea, Capcom created an extremely visually distinct cast that would eventually go on to become the archetypes that are the foundation of most — if not all — fighting games: Shotos (Ryu), slightly-cooler American shotos (Ken), grapplers (Zangief), zoners (Guile), weird monsters (Blanka) and so on. Crucially, Capcom connected each character’s visual identity to their gameplay identity: E. Honda and Zangief were massive, hulking wrestlers, and they played as such, with extremely slow movement and high damage; Balrog, being a boxer, fought exclusively with punches, even when using kick buttons. Meanwhile, Ryu, a classic white-gi-wearing karateka, was a beginner-friendly character that taught players the fundamentals of the game.

Tying all this together was Street Fighter II’s in-universe framing as a tournament of, well, World Warriors, showcasing fighting styles like Muay Thai, sumo, kickboxing, kung fu and whatever Dhalsim is supposed to do. This framing naturally resulted in a lot of ethnic diversity in SFII’s cast. Was this representation any good? God, no! Blanka’s literally just a jungle monster with the colors of the Brazilian flag! But, hey, there certainly weren’t any Jamaican video game characters before Dee Jay, and he was something, at the very least. 

This idea of a world tournament went on to be used by many iconic fighting game series, from The King of Fighters to Tekken to Virtua Fighter to Mortal Kombat. Were these games just riding Street Fighter’s coattails? Well, yeah. But this was a genuinely useful way to create a roster with enough character variety that any arcade-goer would fall in love with at least one of them. These series, all of which became massive successes in their own right, cemented the relationship between gameplay and identity in the fighting game genre. 

Of course, nationality wasn’t the only aspect of character identity that had gameplay implications: Quite infamously, female characters in fighting games have historically tended to have lower health or defense values. You know, because they’re women. On the other hand, until very recently, most if not all large, strong characters were men. Female characters would emphasize agility, combo potential and rushdown gameplay, while male characters had a much wider gamut of playstyles. Now, I’m not saying that Akuma’s low health is an example of transgender coding. But the existence of these tropes creates a pretty interesting phenomenon where gender subversiveness could manifest in something as simple as gameplay. And it certainly did.

Characters like Guilty Gear’s Baiken and Art of Fighting’s King were explicitly designed as subversions of gendered tropes, as both are female characters with gameplay much more reminiscent of their male counterparts. Because identity and gameplay are so closely tied, they also express their masculinity in design and personality. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these two are some of the most iconic fighting game characters of all time; while video game audiences may be drawn to stereotypes, they are even more drawn to the disruption of stereotypes. On the other side of the gender spectrum, Street Fighter III added Remy to its roster to fill the gap of androgynous male characters and as a foil to the very masculine series protagonists, Ryu and Alex. As could be expected, SNK did the same a few years later with Ash Crimson, who, to be fair, ended up as a longer lasting character than Remy. Both of these characters fall into the classic trope of gender-nonconformity signifying non-heroism, being rivals to the masculine series protagonists and generally antagonistic towards them. Despite this, neither is an outright villain, and Ash went on to become a long-time protagonist for KOF.

While all of these characters could very easily be read as Queer (I would definitely do so, because I think Queer headcanons are fun), there were a few canonically LGBTQ+ characters in early fighting games whose existence undeniably played a big role in shaping the genre into what it is today. Technically speaking, the first-ever LGBTQ+ character in a fighting game was Street Fighter’s Eagle, who originates from the first Street Fighter game but was first playable in Capcom vs. SNK 2 (2001), where his Freddie Mercury inspiration was made even clearer with a healthy dose of implied homosexuality via win quotes (this means that Sol Badguy is also gay). Unfortunately, nobody cares about Eagle. In 2003, Samurai Shodown V introduced Yumeji Kurokouchi, a character with no canon gender and in-story “body issues.” Even before both of these, there was Guilty Gear X’s Venom, who is still one of the most beloved gay characters in any game, even 24 years after he first came out. Not only was he the first fighting game character to be portrayed as gay, he’s also one of the genre’s first black characters, and has one of the best arcs in the whole Guilty Gear series. 

No article about LGBTQ+ representation in video games would be complete without mentioning Poison. While she originated in Final Fight and wouldn’t appear in a fighting game until Street Fighter III: 2nd Impact (or be playable until SFxT), she is possibly the most iconic trans character in the genre, and has been part of the Street Fighter universe for well over twenty years now. Although a widespread myth claims that she was only “made trans” in the American localization of Final Fight so that players “wouldn’t beat up a woman,” Poison was referred to by a Japanese slur for trans women in pre-release design documents. Her portrayal hasn’t always been the most respectful — but she’s confident, proud and beautiful, which are traits shared by unfortunately few transfeminine characters, and even fewer in the 1990s and 2000s. Poison’s announcement and release as a DLC character in Street Fighter V coincided almost exactly with my most gender-turbulent teenage years, and I spent hundreds of hours playing as her back when I was absolutely terrible at fighting games, just because she was a happy, confident and beautiful transgender woman, and shit, I wanted to be all of those things. So, uh, you could say I’m a bit biased here, but I’m definitely not the only one. 

Sadly, not all LGBTQ+ representation is created equal. For every Venom, there are at least a few stinkers, many of whom have been lost to history (probably for the better). While these characters weren’t and aren’t downright offensive, their adherence to stereotypical portrayals of Queerness is pretty frustrating, especially as someone who wants to love these characters so, so bad. There’s the classic “trans-in-the-manual character,” here represented by Guilty Gear’s Testament, who was referred to as ryōsei (essentially, bigender) by Daisuke Ishiwatari in an interview, which is very cool. Unfortunately, since this interview was only in Japanese, and their in-game presentation had no indication of this, alongside the fact that official translations always used he/him pronouns, the entire Western Guilty Gear fanbase has been unwittingly misgendering and mischaracterizing them for the past twenty years (or did so until Strive’s release). I don’t intend to blame either the fans or the developers; it’s just frustrating to see wishy-washy, unclear representation. 

And speaking of wishy-washy, unclear representation, there’s Tekken’s Leo Kliesen. A lot of people love Leo (and there has been a lot of scholarly research on the character’s portrayal) but I can’t say I do myself. Leo is, like the aforementioned Yumeji Kurokouchi, a character without a canon gender. What I don’t like about them, though, is that instead of simply committing to referring to them as non-binary in some way or another, the Tekken development team has consistently referred to Leo’s gender as “unknown,” which, to me, reads like a riddle to be solved more than any real example of Queerness. While I’m not the biggest fan of Leo, or of Tekken for that matter, the line between acceptable and unacceptable Queer representation is incredibly blurry, particularly when it concerns coding and ambiguity rather than explicit characterization that can more easily be critiqued. 

Fighting games also have a bit of a history with fanservice-focused characters, as anybody who’s ever interacted with fighting game Reddit would be able to tell you. Quite a few of these fall into the femme fatale/dominatrix/succubus archetypes, which, to be fair, tends to make for pretty interesting gameplay. The issue arises when these characters end up reinforcing the “horny bisexual” stereotype, with characters like Morrigan, Mature and Mileena having implied sexual or romantic attraction to other women in a way that feels very much like an extension of their fanservice rather than real bisexuality. I’m just operating on vibes here — Juri Han’s Street Fighter IV profile lists “big boobs” as one of her interests, but I’m more inclined to call that a punchline based on the idea that women being attracted to other women is somehow abnormal rather than an example of real representation. I love fanservice as much as the next person and I like all of these characters, but when the BlazBlue series creator says that Makoto Nanaya’s sexuality was intended to “fill a plot gap for yuri characters,” it feels pretty gross. Speaking of BlazBlue, it also contains one of my least favorite tropes of all time: the whole “guy-gets-turned-into-a-girl” schtick, also seen in SNK Heroines — again, it just feels like it’s treating trans people as a punchline. 

Lastly, there’s the Guilty Gear XX iteration of Bridget, who was initially a male character hailing from a village with a superstitious belief against male twins that resulted in him being forced to present as a woman (not off to a great start) while actually being a boy, silly. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with this story, but it unwittingly plays into very harmful stereotypes, especially when you have scenes like Johnny flirting with Bridget and being embarrassed when he finds out he was actually flirting with a man. Because of this portrayal, Bridget became a central figure in the online “trap” fanbase … community … thing? I don’t want to delve into problematic parts of that community here — any trans person who’s been a part of that space in the past would be able to give their own horror stories — but Bridget did become an icon for a term that perpetuates all kinds of shitty things, from the idea that trans women are just gay men who “trap” straight men into sex with them, to feminine men being somehow better and purer than trans women, because “traps aren’t gay …” Boom, we’re back in the 2000s. Hey, this Kanye guy makes some pretty good music, I sure hope he doesn’t start defending Nazis ten years from now. 

So this was the situation in the late 2000s: Fighting games had loads of diverse characters, many great, but just as many weighed down by stereotypes and tropey portrayals, and as the abject failure of Street Fighter III showed, these iconic characters had to continue existing for these games to be successful. A good solution, then, was to flesh out these characters and add dimensionality to them, which is why so many newer fighting games have reworked most if not all of their returning characters. Their success has been mixed, but the new personalities, stories and gameplay given to characters like Mortal Kombat’s ninjas, Yoshimitsu, Dee Jay, Blanka and Cody, among others, have kept these decades-old characters fresh and interesting over the years.

Some redesigns also added more Queer representation to these series: Although not strictly a redesign, Mortal Kombat X’s Jin is a relative of Kung Lao’s and a big part of that game’s story whose healthy dose of implied homosexuality was expanded upon in the following game. Unfortunately, Jin has been thrown to the wayside in favor of characters like Robocop, Freddy Kreuger and Omni-Man, so it loses a few points. In that same game, Mileena and Tanya were put into a kinda-cool, kinda-tropey-and-weird lesbian relationship, but hey, “kinda-cool, kinda-tropey-and-weird” describes the entire Mortal Kombat series, and I love it for that.

A shining example of a redesigned character, though, is Seth. Street Fighter IV’s main villain was a literal clone with an expectedly boring personality and, worst of all, he was bald. When he returned for Street Fighter V, his old body was discarded in favor of a Doll body, and Seth’s new androgynous presentation made them one of my favorite characters, alongside their changed moveset and general playstyle. They were pretty popular in SFV, although I’m not sure how much of that comes down to a good redesign and how much to the fact that they were arguably the best character in the game for a long time. Regardless, I don’t think it would be a stretch to claim that Seth’s redesign set the stage for the two characters that prompted the writing of this article. 

The first of these two is Testament, who, in March 2022, was announced as the final character of Guilty Gear Strive Season 1. To put it lightly, the new Testament fucking rocks. Over 20 years after their original appearance in the first GG games, here they were again, looking almost unrecognizable — it took me until halfway through their trailer to realize that this wasn’t a new character — which, to be fair, was somewhat expected for Strive, a game that changed almost every legacy character for better or for worse. Their Queer identity, which was almost nonexistent in their older appearances, was now on full display — for many Western fans, this was the first time Testament was Queer. It made complete sense, too: Why would an immortal being that has, as Daisuke put it, transcended humanity, not be agender? In the time between XX and Strive, Testament went from a jaded, hateful villain to someone who rediscovered their love of life, which is not only a beautiful arc for a character to have, but also particularly fitting when it coincides with the blossoming of their Queer identity. My favorite example of this change is their hobbies list, which went from “slaughter,” “playing with children” and “thinking” to a massive list containing gems like “plastic modeling (esp. giant robots),” “painting (not well),” “nail art, golfing, star-gazing, touring hot springs, board games, writing sci-fi novels” and much, much more. You get the impression that Testament is the very definition of vibing, chilling, focusing and/or flourishing — isn’t that what we should all aspire to be? They’re also voiced by a trans woman in the English dub, which is sweet. 

The second of these characters, and probably the most popular transgender character in any recent media, was Strive’s incarnation of Bridget. Initially, Bridget didn’t look much different from her XX appearance but, upon playing through her arcade mode, it’s shown that she tried to live as a man after XX’s events but ultimately decided, by herself, to continue to live as a woman instead. While some very online people will be quick to tell you that this is a classic case of woke localization, this change in Bridget’s character was explicit in the game’s Japanese version and, in a later interview, it was revealed that Bridget was always intended to be trans, just like Testament. And let me tell you, this new Bridget was a smash hit: I know dozens of trans people that picked up Strive because of her, lots of people whose Queer identity was discovered in large part through Bridget and even more people who just think she’s neat. It’s impossible to overstate just how popular Bridget is now, and how much she and Testament’s presence in Strive have pushed the boundaries of trans representation in fighting games. To me, what’s most important about Bridget is that she’s an unabashed expression of trans joy — as I mentioned earlier in regard to Poison, having a transgender character just be proud and confident and happy does a lot. While she obviously wasn’t as personally impactful for me and I’m still a little salty about losing to her at Combo Breaker, Bridget is, in my view, the most important transgender character in a fighting game, and maybe the most important transgender character in any game ever. 

Before wrapping up this discussion, I’d like to highlight some more recent Queer characters. These are from games I don’t have that much experience with, but still, they’re there, and they’re pretty cool. Even though none of these characters technically originate in a fighting game, Granblue Fantasy Versus has so much good representation that it would be unfair to leave it out. From my favorite lesbian couple, Katalina and Vira, to Yuel and Cagliostro, the Granblue games have a wide gamut of canonically Queer characters, not to mention all of their Queer-coded characters. Ladiva is also a great example of a transfeminine character that doesn’t adhere to any sort of gendered standards regardless of what others may say. Street Fighter 6’s Marisa doesn’t just break gender convention by being a female heavyweight character, but she’s also heavily implied to be pansexual and polyamorous — the only character in a major game series that I can think of that’s either of these things. 

There are probably some characters I’m leaving out, especially if you include the implied or the ambiguous, but I think I’ve covered most significant LGBTQ+ characters in the fighting game genre. Almost every character I mentioned is one that I personally love or at least like, and trust me, they all have their die-hard fans. That’s just what fighting game characters do: Take the already strong connection players form with characters and turn it up to 11. 

In most video games, you’ll spend at most a few dozen hours with your main characters, seeing and feeling them grow as you progress through story or gameplay. This is plenty of time for people to get attached, as anybody who has been around any video game fandom could surely tell you. But in a fighting game, you could easily spend hundreds of hours practicing a character, listening to their voice lines ad infinitum, downplaying them online, making friends on the basis of playing them and at that point you’d have to be insane not to get attached. When I first picked Zato as my Strive main, I just found his gameplay the most fun — but three years later, as the proud owner of a $50 Eddie plushie, a Zato mousepad, a Zato shirt, multiple Zato charms and stickers and the cutest little custom clay figurine, it would be dishonest to claim that he isn’t one of my favorite characters ever.

Really, it’s no wonder that the Queer characters we have in fighting games are so popular, and rightly so — LGBTQ+ representation is great to see, and even better to experience first-hand through gameplay and community. 

Daily Arts Writer Ariel Litwak can be reached at arilit@umich.edu.

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