Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door released in 2004 for the Nintendo GameCube. As a follow up to the first game, The Thousand-Year Door had much to live up to. With an amazing story line and a great cast of characters; one character stood out. Vivian, the youngest sister of the Shadow Sirens, is written to be a trans woman. For a game released in 2004, it was interesting to see Nintendo create a character that relates to transgender individuals.
Category Archives: transgender representation in games
Interview: Ektomarch Releasing Trans-Positive Game Aerannis
I had the pleasure to interview Robert Rollins from ektomarch about Aerannis which will be released on September 15, 2015 on Steam for the PC and MAC.
Aerannis is an open-ended mission-based action platformer with stealth elements. It is set in the future in Plovdiv which is ruled by radical feminists. The protagonist, a 27-year old transgender woman who is a professional assassin, uncovers a conspiracy run by an ancient society. She most choose if she should save a world who barely considers her a full person.
History of Poison from Final Fight
I was going to do some research on the history of the character Poison from the Final Fight franchise and also found in the Street Fighter franchise, but I found a twenty minute video by MegatonStammer that covered the topic very well (you can see it at the bottom of this article). The video was released on YouTube on February 26, 2012 just over a week before the release of Street Fighter X Tekken.
Some of his language that the YouTuber uses when talking about the subject is cringe worthy. MegatonStammer never does state his/her gender identity in the video. Going by voice alone it sounds like he is a male. It would be easy to say that he is a cisgender male that interested in transgender women as a fetish and holds views of transgender women from the media’s representation of us. Yet, I don’t think he is being transphobic but it rather just naive. In his video he is generally respectful when talking about Poison and defending that she is a transgender woman.
Magic: The Gathering Introduces First Transgender Character
Alesha, Who Smiles at Death
Art by Anastasia Ovchinnikova
I have played Magic: The Gathering before in the past, but I’m not a huge fan of the series. I have played the digital version of the game from time to time. I also have not gotten into the many different novels and short stories written about the franchise. There was one online short story that sparked my attention.
About a week ago the Fate Reforged set was released with the digital version to be released on February 2, 2015. On January 28, 2015 a short story about one of the characters, Alesha, Who Smiles at Death, was posted titled “A Truth of Names”.