Guilty Gear Strive: Dual Rulers Episode 2 Reaction | ANIME REACTION

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1. 

   @gatr2897 6か月 ago

   This episode was crazy. So Unika is a brand new character made just for this show, and the community has been mulling over what exactly she could be since the initial reveal of this show, but this episode really threw a wrench in a lot of theories. I think the leading theory has been that she's related to Dizzy somehow since they have the same eye color, and when she was announced to be coming to the game as a playable character they showed a shot of her that was very evocative of a cutscene from the first game, of Justice, who is Dizzy's mother. But with this timeline and future vision stuff, she's looking to be a lot more tied to the story of Guilty Gear Strive than I anticipated. they mentioned it when expositing about how Sol lost his powers, but in the last story he faced down a woman named I-No who had free control over time and a very complex ideology. She also had a vision of the future, one that she would always describe as dull and grey, so it's possible that Unika is connected to her somehow…

   But yeah, that guy at the end, Axl Low, his powers are actually connected to I-No, through some fluke of the universes code they share the same ID meaning he also has all of I-Nos powers. He's originally from 1990s Great Britain, he's a good man who hates violence, he cleaned his neighborhood of crime without killing a single person, and he was also committed to a woman named Megumi, but then suddenly he slipped through time into the future. He believed for a long time that he was just unlucky, but eventually he found out he was controlling time subconsciously, and that his existence is actually far more important to the universe than he knew, in ways that are way too hard to explain rn, but suffice to say, he's really powerful. Since Sol is so old, Axl is implied to have run into him many times while slipping through time, they're like drinking buddies. Last we saw Axl he actually managed to be reunited with his girlfriend at last, she was brought into this time. It's REALLY funny in a fucked up way to see what's become of him now though, I expect we'll probably be following his pov for a bit next episode. But yeah if Sol and Sin can get to him then he could probably be a lot of help when it comes to Unika and her supposed vision of the future. My guess for where he is right now is that he's slipped into that very future that Unika saw, although who knows why he's detained like that.

   Bridget! She's my personal favorite character, and my main in the game. She's kind of controversial because she was originally a boy in the old games but she's gone through an arc that ended with her coming out as a trans woman. Basically, she was born as part of a set of twin boys in a town that had a superstition where twins of the same sex brought bad luck, and the younger of the two was to either be exiled or put to death. Bridgets parents obviously didn't want this so they concealed her birth sex and raised her like a girl. As Bridget grew up though she could tell that this charade was filling her parents with guilt and so she tried a lot of things to convince them she was happy, including picking up yoyo as a hobby. Eventually she concluded that the only way to fix things was to become rich and successful as a boy to dispell the superstition, so she went out and became a bounty hunter! Originally she sought the bounty for Dizzy's death but never made it to her, but they eventually became good friends, it's actually kind of a shock to me that she wasn't at Dizzy's wedding last episode. But yeah eventually she made her fortune, as a man, and that freed her from the towns superstition and expectations, but something still felt off. All this time her identity was being dictated by other people, whether it be her parents or by the town, but now that she was finally free to actually explore herself, for herself, and after some helpful conversations with Ky Kiske and some others, she's decided to live as a girl after all! Unfortunately back in the day there was a big online culture about Bridget and the fact that she was a feminine boy… some people decide to make her whole arc into a culture war thing, claiming she's a boy still for whatever reason, it really sucks, but I can back up all of the info I've given you here with sources, this is the truth I promise. But yeah she's awesome, I really love her.

   One thing I also forgot to mention about Baiken in the first episode, she's missing an arm from the night when her village was attacked, she's an amputee. What's pretty cool is that in that empty sleeve she's got a ton of gadgets hidden like that flail that she used to grab Unika's weapon. She's also got a flamethrower, a firework gun, just a whole bunch of nonsense. She's Japanese which gives her a higher affinity for magic, and she can wield Ki, the hardest type of magic to use. She's also recently become a Weak Point Diviner, she can see people's weak points like X-Ray almost. She's really a force to be reckoned with, like Bridget isn't a slouch either, she's a top class bounty hunter, but Baiken still managed to show her up when she was in a tough spot.

   Since he's appeared some more in this episode I'll talk about President Vernon a bit. He's not a playable character but he was featured a lot in Guilty Gear Strives story, him and Sol had to work together to survive in The White House after a villain took control of it, including brainwashing all of the guards. Vernons not super strong but I mean he's an ex soldier of the crusades and one of his arms is secretly a cannon, which is why he was brandishing it at Unika when she caught him. He's about as good a president as you could reasonably ask for, extremely friendly in foreign affairs, just wants peace.

   Btw just a note, they keep saying "law power" at the beginning of the episodes for some reason. I saw a well known figure in the community named Solradguy who is known for their fan translations, they addressed it, apparently the word they use in Japanese to mean "magic" can also be read as "law power" so when they say law power what they really mean is magic. Hopefully Crunchyroll can fix the subtitles… They also botched the name of an existing character in one of the exposition dumps. There's a character from the games named Happy Chaos, but they translated his name as "Innocent Chaos", which is actually an error I've seen Google Translate make before too. The rest of the subtitles have been seemingly completely right so far, although I question the use of the word "timeline" when referring to Axls location, because it's a big part of his story that he can't leave this timeline or else it will be erased. They also had Sin calling Sol "dad" in the last episode when really it should've been "Old Man", but yeah.