About the whole Samus thing… *rant*

Image made by mivion on DeviantArt

CW: Transphobia

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a little while now, but I wanted to give myself time to gather all my thoughts in order.

So, I love video games. I’ve already written about this a little bit, but I’ve been a gaming enthusiast (I hate the word “gamer” because of its stereotypical and negative connotations) since I was, like five and played Sonic the Hedgehog on my cousin’s Sega Genesis for the first time. And I’ve always been a big Nintendo fangirl, and a fan of the Metroid series in particular. I love the sci-fi atmosphere, that wonderfully foreboding feeling of being alone on an alien planet. I loved the design of the creatures, from the space dragon Ridley to the absolutely terrifying Space Pirates. And most of all, I loved being able to play as a woman! Not an hyper-sexualized vixen, nor a helpless damsel in distress (well, until Other M, but we dare not speak its name in public), but a kick-ass bounty hunter with a blaster rifle and a grapple beam. Samus Aran is bold, independent, and strong. Hell, most people thought she was a man until the ending of the first game, when she took off her 8-bit helmet and revealed that long blonde hair. She’s probably my favorite video game heroine ever, able to stand toe to toe with Mario and Link and deliver classics in her own right. Nothing wrong with that right?

The ending to the original Metroid, in all its poorly translated glory. Granted, the other ending had her in a bikini, but still…

Well, apparently there was. See, about a week ago a transgender activist named Brianna Wu wrote an article claiming that Samus was a trans woman. And of course, this being the Internet and the mainstream gaming community being a cesspool of hatred and stupidity (sorry, it’s true), people lost their shit. There’s been tons of horrible comments on Twitter and Reddit, and more than a couple articles completely shitting on Wu and her life. I’m not going to link to them, because fuck those assholes getting any more views than they already are, but one of them calls Wu a “shemale”, so you can see the level of mature understanding that they’re going for here.

My first question, before I talk about the absolute shame these cretins bring to the gaming community, is why is this such a hot button issue in the first place? Samus Aran may be trans, she may not be. More than that, though, Samus Aran is a fictional character. As in, not a real person. She was created by a Japanese video game company in the 80’s, in some way as a clever homage to the movie Alien. I understand people would be pissed if she were an actual cisgender woman and people were saying she was trans. I don’t like people saying that I’m a cis male. But again, Samus is a fictional character, and she exists only in the imaginations of her creators and her fans. Her gender identity makes absolutely zero impact on global warming, the war against ISIS, or any issue going on in the real world. I’m not saying that games aren’t important or that characterization doesn’t matter, but please, people, choose your battles.

And for that matter, why is this one instance people saying a single fictional character may be trans getting everyone so defensive? I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said before a million times by far better writers, but transgender people don’t exactly get a lot of positive representation in mainstream media. Most of the time, if we are represented as all, we’re portrayed as jokes or serial killers. This is finally turning around in a small way for us, with trans celebrities like Laverne Cox getting a lot of positive media attention and movies like The Danish Girl portraying trans characters in a good light, but our representation in the world of video games is pretty much nonexistent. Off the top of my head, literally the only openly and positively portrayed trans woman I can think of in any video game ever is this random NPC from Guild Wars 2. Meanwhile, there are so many straight, dark haired, white men in video games that it’s become a punchline.. Can’t we just have one trans character in a video game who actually means something and does shit? Even if it’s just because of some theory by an internet blogger?

Not exactly the most diverse group of heroes

But this issue goes deeper than Samus and Metroid. It goes deeper than representation in video games, or the gaming community as a whole. The whole reason this is an issue is because of transphobia. Simply put, a lot of people hate trans people, and don’t want to treat us like human beings. They don’t want to hear that a strong, powerful character that they love might be trans. They don’t even want to entertain that possibility. They could just say, “well, no, she’s not”, or “it doesn’t matter”, or even “she could be, who are we to judge?” and leave it that. But that’s not enough for these absolute wastes of the human spirit who pollute the world with their intolerant bullshit. They can’t just let a couple people say what they want and be happy. They have to rage online. They have to reply to a simple opinion-based article with hate speech. They have to deny us our very identity, to send us death threats, to make us feel like we don’t belong in this world and become afraid for our own safety.

Brianna Wu could have said that any video game character was trans. She could have wrote her article about Lara Croft, or Solid Snake, or hell, even Mario, and it would have had the exact same effect. See, cis people don’t have to prove that they’re cis. Nobody questioned that any of these characters were cis (even though their creators never said anything proving or disproving this, as far as I know), because cis people are seen as the default in our society. But when it comes to transgender characters, or trans people in general, we have to fight tooth and fucking nail against all the bigotry, all the hate, all the bile sent our way, just to have our voices heard. Sometimes, the hate even comes from the official source, as when Metroid co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto made a cruel joke in an old interview about Samus not being a “transvestite” (and hey, bigots, they’re NOT the same thing).

The very talented actor and comedian Eddie Izzard. He is a transvestite, NOT a transgender woman. See, there’s a difference!

To be entirely honest, I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being a joke to ignorant people. I’m sick of having my identity questioned every day. I’m sick of not being able to even pretend, to entertain the possibility, that a character I loved and grew up with, is like me, without being attacked for my opinion. I’m sick of people getting up in arms about said character when there is so much else in the world to be upset about. And most importantly, I’m sick of all this happening when trans people are fucking dying every day and not a word comes out of these pieces of human intestinal waste.

I can’t be nice anymore. What’s going to happen when some young trans kid, just like me, plays Metroid Prime for the first time, gets hooked on it, and then goes on the internet to read about their new favorite game and has to read all this misogynistic verbal diarrhea instead? What is that kid going to think? What are they going to do?

We play video games to escape a cruel and often hateful world. It really sucks when all that hate goes right back into something we love.

/rant