#next post will be about the bedframe in strive so Stay Tuned

[dream-meltic]

Hi, hello, I've been meaning to use my Tumblr account for like AGES but so far haven't. So I'm letting it be a space where I can just talk about Bedman (and Delilah)'s lore, development etc and have it as a resource for myself and others to refer back to. I'm just very autistic about him and express my love through analysis, okay

The thing with Bedman is that because his lore can seem a little all over the place or is hidden behind JP-only content, there's a lot of misconceptions about him floating around! I'm going to make two posts on the major misconceptions I see everywhere (one about Romeo himself, the other about the bed) and will talk about other aspects of his lore later.

So let's talk about a dreaded subject of mine: Bedman's age, and the really bad evidence people use when talking about it. It's going to be a long post under here just so I'm completely clear, so buckle up, and take a nice reminder that you can headcanon what you like and to just send an ask over if you want further clarification, evidence etc! (But please read all of it before you do just in case I answer your question during it)

Let's begin with the most obvious thing. Is his age confirmed? Do we have a number? No. Despite very common claims he is specifically either 14 or 16, neither of these numbers have ever come up officially in relation to Bedman's age. If you see someone saying this, chances are they heard it from someone else, and didn't really question where they got that information. The large majority of Guilty Gear characters are not given an actual age. Plenty of them still don't have a birthday, you know….

The main problem and misconception comes with the next part where people believe he is canonically, or canonically implied to be, a minor. Usually based on other character's dialogue. I'm all for headcanon, but when you begin insisting that it's canonical and start being rude to others over it I do have to draw a line there, so let me explain why the evidence used for him being either of those things is actually not good enough:

1. Chipp/Answer dialogue

In Xrd SIGN's story mode, Chipp and Bedman have a brief fight and during it, he calls Answer to try and figure out who he is and gives him a brief description of what he looks like. Here's a full quote of what he says to him:

"Looks human, or at least humanoid, but he's strapped to a person-shaped bed. Looks to be in the mid-to-late teens--the kid, not the bed. Caucasian, short purple hair, glasses. He's sleeping, but the bed's walking around. Too dark to tell eye color. He's wearing what appears to be a hospital gown... Getting anything?"

Later, when Answer becomes playable in Rev2, he repeats some of his exact same words from the Japanese version of this dialogue when selecting Bedman with him as your system voice.

These two are usually used very first when asked to provide evidence of him supposedly being a minor canonically, but people seem to miss out entire words of what both of them say: rather than saying Bedman is mid-to-late teens, they're saying he looks like he is mid-to-late teens. Chipp is describing his physical appearance to Answer- not his biological data.

When you consider another official line about Bedman, that there is "no official documents that can prove he exists", sorry to say that someone who just met him three minutes ago won't have a complete dead-on accurate guess of his age. Chipp isn't telling us Bedman's age range (which in the case of his dialogue specifically, would mean he is 15-19, which counts as an adult regardless), he's saying what he thinks Bedman looks like.

Answer is just repeating Chipp's dialogue. In other words, he's doing the exact same thing.

And just saying, as an adult, I get mistaken for a teenager all the time. It's very, very common especially with short adults.

2. Other character's dialogue- such as calling him "child" and "kid"

I have to make this a separate section because it's used less than Chipp and Answer's dialogue, but this is the other thing I see the most. Throughout the story mode you'll find Bedman is frequently referred to as a child or a kid. So I ask you to go back up to the previous section and ask yourself: how would any of these people actually know?

I'm going to use May here to prove a point. In Xrd alone, there are several cases of her being referred to with words like "little girl", "child", "kid", etc. However, Xrd May is at bare minimum in her 20s. This is also the case for her official profiles, where she's referred to with similar terms to Bedman.

If you didn't know May was an adult, congratulations on discovering the main joke with her. TL;DR: By Xrd, May is 20+. In the English dub, she even says "22", but because that's not present in Japanese we can't say that's her exact age. All we know is, by that point, she was in her 20s. So why does everyone still call her a little girl? Why do people still treat her like a child, Bedman included? The same reason they do it to Bedman: they are assuming based on her appearance.

In other words, why on earth are you taking Slayer's word as gospel of all people when he didn't even know he existed until he was beating his ass?

3. Bedman's height/weight

This one particularly infuriates me as an adult who does get mistaken for a kid for these things, but I'll let that anger slide to explain why you can't use this as evidence.

For starters… well, May, once again. I won't repeat my previous talking points, but you genuinely can't use Bedman's stature as proof when May, who is just the tiniest bit taller and heavier than him, is right there. Like, no actually, why are you using his height as proof??

Next, he and Delilah have the exact same height and weight. But they're not twins. In fact, they can't even be close in age, for a reason I'll go in depth on later just to keep this section about the evidence itself. Bedman is her older brother- Delilah being 12 at that height and weight, and then Bedman being somewhere in his teens at that exact height and weight is… um, impossible. Instead, we get an interesting confirmation from Faust about the reason for Bedman being as tiny as he is. Unlike other characters, Faust can be trusted on this information because he's an actual medical professional who may as well have seen this kind of situation before. He also isn't saying his age is one thing or the other, just talking about his appearance.

"They say children who sleep well grow up healthy, but that doesn't mean children who don't sleep aren't healthy. Hm... what is it that makes you look like - ah, your brain."

Japanese dialogue:

"寝る子は育つといいますが寝ない子が育たない訳ではないですよ? 貴方のスタイルの必然性は･･･そうか、脳ですね?"

The Japanese dialogue makes this a lot more obvious, but Faust is asking why he looks like a child. And the reason is his coma.

…In other words, he and Delilah can't grow. Their bodies are frozen as is to stop them from dying. Without constant care, they'd both die in their coma without it. Now that Delilah's awake, it's possible we'll see some growth from her, but Bedman was stuck like that for who knows how long.

So yes, you can't use how he looks as evidence.

And thank god, that's about all the major points used. You can see why they're so shaky as evidence, can't you? All are based entirely on assumptions, which were based on appearance, being treated as confirmations. But they're not, they're just looks into how other characters view him- not how we, the viewer, should.

But let me argue for the other end of it here, that Bedman is implied to be an adult instead, just to prove a point about how bad the evidence is in comparison to the other side's.

Let me go back to what I mentioned previously- that he and Delilah can't be close in age. For this, the main answer is in Xrd Revelator's story mode, and more specifically his long talk with Axl Low. I truly believe it is extremely important for understanding Bedman and Delilah, so if you haven't yet, I highly recommend watching it!

From Bedman's dialogue both there and elsewhere, we learn the following about Delilah:

- She is far deeper in her dream world than he is, and her senses are "blocked off" so to speak from the outside world.

- She doesn't know her own mother.

- She only people that have even been capable of speaking to Delilah are Bedman and Ariels. However, Ariels has not known either of them all their life.

- She was born like this.

Why are all these important, you ask? Think for a moment, think about all those factors together.

Now, riddle me this:

Who raised Delilah, then?

Bedman had his mother, we know this. But if Delilah couldn't even feel anything happening to her in the outside world, how would their mother have raised her? How does Delilah know how to talk, read, anything at all? When you put how she refers to Baiken in with all this, the answer is kind of clear: Bedman was the one who raised her. Despite Baiken acting like a traditional parent, Delilah gives her the nickname of "big sis". Because these behaviors, to her, are a sibling thing. Delilah never met her mother to be able to know what a mother would act like. Who she does know is her big sibling.

Which means, in order for Bedman to be 13-17, he would need to have been 1-5 years old while that happened. I don't think you need me to tell you that for a non-gear, even a hyper intelligent one, that's just not happening. Especially considering that he is also inside of his dream and has seemingly only one person on the outside to raise and provide for him. When your brain is literally still in the earliest stages of development, you're not going to suddenly become a genius at age 3 and be capable of raising a baby on your own. You'd see that kind of insufferable intelligence come out more around age 7.

If you didn't catch the difference between that piece of evidence and the previous ones, here it is: the evidence used for him being a minor is based solely on dialogue from characters who have no way of knowing his age, and assumptions based on appearance. The evidence used here is based on Bedman and Delilah's own dialogue, two people that WOULD know this information, and some very basic literature analysis skills you'll learn when you're like 14.

When you're talking about character lore without a definitive answer written down somewhere, the priority must be put on their own dialogue and the dialogue of people who, canonically, would have access to the information you want. So unfortunately, Chipp saying he looks like a teenager has no weight compared to a major implication that he raised Delilah from the bedsiblings' dialogue. Thaat's how analysis works

So wow that was long! I just really wanted to make sure I was understood but in case anyone still has any questions, needs me to clarify something or provide more evidence of something, anything like that: just send an ask over. They should be open and anon should be on too so don't be scared, no judgment to be found here. My only hope is that I didn't sound like I was rambling nonsense…….