Anonymous A started this discussion 1 year ago#119,723
I understand the desire to claim a character for your community as a means of making you feel seen and represented within a particular form of media, but sometimes there are characters you just don’t try to fuck with. You don’t have to always have a cis female or a trans female to feel represented.
Samus Aran from the Metroid series was one of those characters. Long believed to have been a male merely on the basis that most video game characters were males. The decision to reveal that she had been a girl this entire time was definitely a fresh take on video games. She also allowed young girls at the time to feel as if they could have a character they say themselves in. She would later go on to prove to me one of the most badass female characters that Nintendo ever made and now people just seem to forget or neglect her. Even Nintendo.
In more recent times, the transgender community, who likely favored the character from their youth, attempted to claim her by starting to put forth the idea that she is transgender. I understand wholeheartedly the desire to have a character relate to your situation, but sometimes you have to leave something alone if it’s not broken. This is a character that should be left alone for the cisgender girls to have.
It’s not as if video games never had representation for the transgender community. Most people would mention Poison from the Final Fight games for whom the creators only fairly recently validated her trans identity. However, one such example of a badass chad trans character is from the game Grandblue Fantasy. Her name is Ladiva and she is a trans woman who while stuck within an overly masculine body radiates a feminine energy so strong that even I do would desire for her to choke me out between her thighs. She is also someone who doesn’t desire gender transitioning because she feels it’ll be disrespectful to her parents to change the body they created for her. She is someone who is what she is. And I think this is a character that a majority of trans women should get behind. Especially those who may not pass all too well in society.
I just don’t understand this need to claim characters who are bad ass on their own instead of creating new bad asses all their own. I’d rather see the creation of more characters like Samus Aran or Ladiva than wonder if Peter Parker is a trans man.