A Brief History of Trans Women in Nintendo Games

hey there Abby coming to you from the editing chair right now which is the same as the regulator I just wanted to go ahead and upfront slap a big old content warning for transphobia on this because we're going to talk about some of that stuff a little while ago I got to thinking about trans women in Nintendo games because I realized there was a surprisingly high amount stretching back far into video game history not to say that Nintendo's some secret Haven for Trans representation in fact most of the trans representation found within their games is far from perfect in this video I intend to Chronicle them to the best of my ability I'll try as best I can to work through these characters chronologically which means our starting point is in 1988 with Super Mario Brothers 2 or Super Mario Brothers USA or I guess in 1987 with Yume kojo Doki Doki Panic but for simplicity's sake we'll say Super Mario Brothers 2. in the game a recurring boss you must fight is a Pink Dinosaur who shoots eggs from her snout now naming this character is kind of tricky because of the name used for her in all of the games does the name the Super Mario Brothers 2 manual gives her and there's another name she asks to be called in a later game to top it all off in Japanese her name is completely different to in English this puts me in a bit of a pickle but to avoid confusion for this video I will be referring to her as Birdo even though I believe that her preferred name is burdetta but back to the Super Mario Brothers 2 manual we get instantly blasted with transphobia with the entry on Birdo it reads Berto he thinks he is a girl and spits eggs from his mouth he'd rather be called burdetta now this sucks and unlike future entries on this list there's no explaining it away it's a pretty clear statement that Bodo was trans from a transphobic perspective and just to cover our bases the Japanese manual is pretty much the same I'll beat less transphobic due to how differently Japanese handles gendered pronouns it reads translated of course thanks Sarah girl and spits eggs from their mouth calling them Kathy puts them in a good mood photo's name in Japanese is Catherine in case that wasn't clear as if naming Berto wasn't confusing enough some prints of the manual accidentally switched her name with the unrelated Astra that is an all of berto's story however and it would be an injustice to leave it there Bodo does take quite a long Hiatus after her debut though and we don't see her again until Super Mario RPG in 1996 where she appears as a boss this game isn't relevant for our purposes though and our next visit to Berto was in Super Smash Brothers Melee in 2001. photo appears here as a trophy and the trophy provides us with a significant change it uses she her pronouns for Bodo this is nice but the subsequent entries in the Smash Brothers series sadly don't follow suit with brawl collencara creature of indeterminate gender and Wii U going out of its way to avoid using pronouns for her so a stock Improvement then a slow walking back of that Improvement let's see if she fares any better in her element that is to say Mario games bodo's next appearance in a Mario title is again as a boss in the RPG game Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga in the game she's recruited by purple a villain and a thief who she seems to have fallen in love with she asked him to call her birdie and is very flirtatious in a way that Popple doesn't reciprocate she is depicted as unable or unwilling to notice the fact that he is plainly using her and does not respect her at all even hesitating before calling her a day perhaps her self-esteem is so low that she's so desperate for any kind of validation that she doesn't discriminate with regards of how she gets it and in the 2017 remake the dialogue is unchanged butter would proceed to appear in plenty of Mario spin-off games including tennis baseball golf basketball football the Olympics caught racing and partying only these lost two have anything worth talking about with regards to bodo's gender Mario Kart's contribution to Bodo is very sparse and it's just to add an additional sprinkling of transphobia as if there wasn't enough the Japanese website for Mario Kart Double Dash gives profiles for each of its characters and the translated profile for Birdo reads Catherine appears to be Yoshi's girlfriend but is actually his boyfriend Mario party's contribution is kind of confusing as in the game Super Mario Party Badu gives the player stackers and the in-game guide tells you as much here's the catch while the U.S and Canada versions of the game gender Bodo correctly other versions such as the UK version use he him pronouns for a photo this is pretty disappointing for a game that came out in 2018 but I suppose it's par for the course for the UK and in case you were wondering the original Japanese obviously doesn't use gendered pronouns due to the different structure of the language the next entry on the list is one of the few games that siberto promoted to a major character and believe it or not it's not even a Mario game Captain rainbow was a Japan exclusive Wii game that came out in 2008 and it takes place on memen island a land full of old forgotten Nintendo characters there's a video I've Linked In the description which goes over the game in more detail but for our purposes all you need to understand is that bodo's storyline involves the player discovering her in prison for the perceived crime of using a female bathroom while insisting that she's a woman the player is then tasked with proving her innocence unfortunately the way that you do so is by entering her bedroom and finding a possession of hers which is implied to be a vibrator I don't really see the connection there but at least you managed to abolish regressive bathroom policy on merman Island after the player character helps her out she develops a crush on him one of her few consistent character traits being that she's boy crazy and desperate which isn't great but it's better than misgendering bodo's tracked record across most Mario games is less than Stella but luckily there's one final series she makes an appearance in which is far kinder to her than other games fact I couldn't even find a hint of transphobia across all her appearances in the series the series in question is Paper Mario but she doesn't appear in the series until sticker star cameoing in that as well as Color Splash and having a minor role in the origami can in sticker star she appears briefly out of the blue and performs a short nice serenade tomorrow with lyrics subtly referencing the fact that she's trans then she gives him a goat In Color Splash she holds a concert attended mostly by shy guys and Mario she has a troop of Koopa Troopers backing her up and showering her with praise the lyrics of this song implied the love song written to Yoshi and also referenced Doki Doki Panic a game of origin after the show One Shy Guy comments that she may be past her prime but she still has the moves in the origami King she has a brief appearance as what appears to be a cabaret singer in a cafe at least the sniff it's in the cafe appear to be into it she also appears in a play in which she is treated as desirable and another separate group of Koopa Troopers fought over her wishing to date her however she chooses Mario over them causing them to attack Mario and after he rescues her she gives him a kiss which she clarifies as just a stage kiss then leaves I think it's just wonderful that 32 years after her debut she finally gets a chance to play the role of dancer and I think it's a role that she feds very nicely foreign [Music] was a game that came out in 1986 in Japan a 1987 globally a time in which there were very few female characters in video games and those who did exist were damsels in distress for the male hero to say Samus was one of Gaming's first female heroines because women weren't expected to be heroes as well as the hardware limitations at the time the reveal of Samus is a woman was seen as something of a revelation with most players assuming the character they were controlling was male now this is a little bit transgender but by no means is it enough to dedicate a section of the video to there's some most substantive evidence I'd like to talk about which can be found in the Japanese guidebook for Super Metroid in the 96 page booklet there's a walkthrough for the game storyboards of important sequences and a biography for sermons despite that seeming like the perfect place to go looking for information about Samus we're gonna head to the developer interviews each of the developers was asked information about themselves as well as a secret about Samus only they knew many of the developers simply said they didn't know any secrets about Samus but one background designer hirofumi matsuroka claimed that Samus was not a woman but a new Hearth a Japanese pejorative for trans women roughly equivalent to She-Man however this is by no means conclusive in a 2004 interview the co-creator of Metroid yoshio Sakamoto was asked if a Metroid game would ever come to PlayStation 2 to which you replied this I by no means fluent in Japanese but as best I can translate it read Samus was actually a new half it's impossible have fun with your GameCube seemingly the implication here is that a Metroid game coming to PS2 is as likely as Sam as being trans which is to say not at all so according to the evidence what appears to have happened is a developer decided it would be a funny joke to imply that Samus was trans and that was eventually shut down by a more senior developer I think it kind of sucks that Samus being trans was just a joke made by one of the developers as it perpetuates the harmful notion that the idea of a trans woman is something worthy of ridicule I wish I had a concluding statement that could wrap this section up neatly but I really don't this just sucks and unfortunately it's kind of a theme with trans women not just in Nintendo games but media in general [Music] in Paper Mario the Thousand-Year Door there exists a villainous group called The Shadow sirens consisting of the three sisters Vivian Marilyn and Beldum during the game Vivian defects from the sirens after Mario shows her kindness and joins his party her elder sister bullies her calling her ugly in response to her referring to them as the three Shadow Beauties but why am I talking about her playing through the game there's nothing to indicate that she's trans in the English localization that is but if we look at the original Japanese version of the game we get a very different story each of them performs a part of their introduction with Vivian calling them the sun shimai literally Three Sisters to which Beldum her sister retards which roughly translates to where are the sisters aren't you a man she also routinely uses the first person feminine pronoun atai to refer to herself she also exists to capture card in Super Paper Mario which refers to her as otokonoko literally male daughter or male girl a term used to describe male cross-dressers or Men Who present in a feminine way however when you get into gender bending categories like this there are bound to be crossed wires and plenty of trans women in fiction are placed under the atokonoko umbrella in the English version just as in the Thousand Year Door she's depicted this as this one interestingly a trans identity is maintained in some International versions with the Spanish French and Italian all translating the dialogue the same as Japanese unfortunately this section will be pretty brief as beautynova is an extremely minor character who only gets a few lines of dialogue fortunately though this is going to be the first and potentially only character who doesn't have any transphobia associated with her either in or outside of game Beauty Nova is an NPC you can occasionally run into in the Battle Maison of Pokemon X and Y and her team is randomly generated from a pool of candidates far more interesting for our purposes however there's a dialogue she says after you defeat her in English she says yes only a half year ago I was a black belt quite the transformation wouldn't you say black belts are a male exclusive trainer clubs that has existed in Pokemon since the series beginning but while this may seem to heavily imply a few strands it doesn't outright confirm it as black belt is a non-gendered colloquial term to refer to someone who has earned a black belt in a certain martial art however in the Japanese version of the game her transness is even more explicit here her line is I was a karate King just half a year ago the power of Medical Science is awesome wouldn't you say karate King is the Japanese name for the black belt trainer class which makes for an even more explicit statement of gender change adding on top of that the comment about the power of medical science it's clear that she is very explicitly a trans woman which as a trans woman who cares about Pokemon way too much is very nice that wasn't that nice wasn't that a pleasant little reprieve from the way trans Nintendo characters normally get treated and surely now that we're well into the 2010s the final and most recent trans character is bound to be better treated than those that came before right right The Legend of Zelda breath of the Wild released March 3rd 2017 and is considered by many to be one of the best games of all time it also features a quest with link ostensibly a man must infiltrate Gerudo town and town exclusively women are allowed to enter by disguising himself in traditional Gerudo clothing now placing link on the queer spectrum is a task which extends far beyond the scope of this video but plenty of game has quite enjoyed that the game allowed link to cross-dress as it allowed exploration of gender variants both for link and on occasion for the player however when you look at the situation from the perspective of trans politics it comes across quite a bit crueler link a male-bodied individual must invade a female-only space by disguising himself as a woman not great huh especially given that when breath of the wild was released and was a little under a month since Alabama lawmakers introduced a bill to the Senate that would buy trans people from entering bathrooms that weren't unisex now I'm not saying that Nintendo was actively promoting transphobic ideology I think it's purely incidental I believe that ultimately more good was done by the Gerudo outfit being wearable in game then harm was caused by the transphobic narrative the game accidentally presents believe it or not though this section is only tangentially related to Gerudo town it's actually about an NPC who helps the player to sneak into Gerudo town while attempting to find a way to enter the town the character banjo will direct link to what he describes as a man who was able to sneak into Gerudo town after this conversation a character named vilio will spawn wearing Garuda clothing fun fact in Japanese Villa's name is also Vivian which is a very interesting coincidence she apologizes to link for being unable to assist with the search for a man who stuck into Gerudo town after which point the player will be given the option to examine her closer then link is presented with a choice between accusing her of being a man in Disguise would she dismisses and gets upset by or complimenting her appearance which Delights her if her appearance is complimented she offers to sell link a set of Gerudo clothes and will prompt him to change into them immediately after link puts the outfit on she squeals with excitement and states that nobody will suspect him of being a man while he wears it she also asks him out to eat which would be kind of problematic feeling to accept due to the age gap of about a hundred years the dialogue is as far as I'm capable of translating almost identical in the original Japanese version with a notable exception of her directly asking link to be a boyfriend after this a strong gust of wind blows her veil of revealing her face which evokes a shocked reaction from Lynn she fixes her veil and Wands length against strong winds then tells him to come back if he wants more ladies clothing we don't get to see what she looks like beneath the veiling game but we do get to see under her veil in the art book under the veil her skin is discolored in a way that could be used to signify stubble or it could simply be that the area normally covered by her veil is not as tanned as the rest of her body it's interesting to note that in the English version of the art book she has referred to using he him pronouns and the authenticity of the name Villia is called into question in that case how could we be sure that she has indeed a trans woman and not simply a cross-dressing man to be honest we can't be totally certain because historically speaking the borders between trans women and male crossdressers have always been fuzzy especially in Media however I believe that she is a trans woman because of the way she chooses to present her gender she always refers to herself as a woman in English and in Japanese she uses Watashi a pronoun that is gender neutral but has a feminine connotation while it is true the gender presentation does not have the mass gender identity we don't have a concrete statement that proves what her gender identity is so presentation is all we have to go off of I don't think that there's any right or wrong interpretation of ilia's gender unfortunately that doesn't cover all our bases with regards to Villa the framing of the scene with villia's Veil being removed is played for loves as if the idea that a character is disguise being removed and the true gender being revealed is hilarious to the people making these jokes and to those laughing at them the distinction between trans women and cross-dresser is non-existent the idea of someone perceived as male partaking in gender variants is nothing more than a punchline for assess audience to laugh at just look at Bodo in the smb2 manual or matsuoka hirofumi's comment about Samus hatred for trans women is endemic in Nintendo games but they aren't some exception to the treatment of trans women they're the rule I like to believe things are getting better I really do the breath of the Wild released in 2017 only six years ago I hope one day this video will be Obsolete and that the good trans rep will outweigh the bird but I doubt that's gonna happen anytime soon well that was Grim wasn't it that would be a pretty sour note to end the video on so I've prepared something else it isn't necessarily a better portrayal of a trans woman heck it's not even an explicit portrayal of a trans woman but it's something close it's a glint of Hope an impossible hopeless hope but I hope nonetheless and for that we'll need to visit the land of Foodland Cupid Von Vester is a secondary character in Fire Emblem 3 houses who serves as a loyal servant to the Imperial princess edelgard throughout the game hupid is treated us and approaches the world as a man so why are we talking about him today well in the game the player character occasionally can read Anonymous letters from characters asking for advice it's in one of these letters that I treasure lives full transparency here I don't have a screenshot of this lettering game and it's random which letters you receive which would make it difficult to seek up luckily thanks to the Fire Emblem three houses data mine project we can read transcripts of all these letters the letter from Cuba reads to despite my appearance I have long wish to be a pegasus Knight that I may indulge in a lofty few yet that dream has always seemed Out Of Reach can you guess why the correct answer is to suggest that the sender is afraid of heights one might jump out at you straight away is that this isn't really a request for advice it's more of a confession to a long-held secret desire this is interesting but wanting to write a pegasus isn't exactly coming out as transgender or is it you see in the world of Fire Emblem pegasi generally don't accept men as writers in fact pekasai mounted class as a female exclusive in all games except Fates which is support conversation States the pegasi encountered in that game are a different species to those in the rest of the series so if we put the pieces together we get a confession of a secret desire to become something which requires a different gender made anonymously to protect the writer's identity to me this feels like pretty convincing if not conclusive evidence that Cubit is transgender if you feel deceived by that I'm sorry I didn't want to have to end the video with Villia and the note from Hubert is just so Bittersweet that I can't help but see Hubert as a trans woman viewing her own happiness is indulgent and her dream of being a pegasus Knight is unreachable it just feels so fitting for a trans character in this setup unfortunately Cupid does not get to live out her life as a woman in any of three houses possible endings but I don't really care about that the ending I write for her in my head beats any of them easily foreign have a neat conclusion for this video so I guess I'll just finish it then so much for thank you so much if you managed to stick through the video and I'd appreciate any feedback you have if you want to support me you can do so by drawing some art of transfer Hubert Von vestra that's all I need please try your best to help whoever you can and have a lovely day

Channel: ymyrgul

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Id: mOuP9dtSwQY

Length: 22min 36sec (1356 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 05 2023