The Gaming Den

Man I sure love how I specifically went out of my way to abide by people's request to not talk about this in this thread.

I'm not feeling like it's a complete waste to do that at all.

Gamergate is like the reverse Fight Club. The first rule of both gamergate and antigamergate is you don't ever shut up about it.

I thought I heard a major character in Persona 4 was a trans man, possibly one of the squadmates.

Starmaker wrote:Max Lao from Technobabylon.

Source on Max being trans? I don't recall the game itself ever pointing it out.

Orion wrote:I thought I heard a major character in Persona 4 was a trans man, possibly one of the squadmates.

Lies. Persona 4 has two sexually questionable characters: Kanji, who may or may not be gay, and Naoto, who is a female private detective crossdressing as a boy to avoid sexism of japanese police (made worse by Naoto being 15). While parts of the fandom like to talk about Naoto being a transgender, this is explicitly not true.

Orion wrote:I thought I heard a major character in Persona 4 was a trans man, possibly one of the squadmates.

Not exactly. One of the squadmates, Kanji, is a cis man with a great fondness for needlepoint and suchlike and has the most over-the-top gay Shadow imaginable, while another is Naoto, who seems to be a cis girl who wants to be a detective and has a transgender mad scientist Shadow. Everyone's Shadow is a twisted and exaggerated distortion of an internal conflict, and Kanji is potentially straight/bi with a history of girls thinking he's weird while Naoto wants to enter a traditionally masculine field and likes wearing pants.

Naoto is the one I was thinking of. And if their Shadow is trans, wouldn't that strongly imply that they are trans? What with Shadow-selves typically being used to depict suppressed or repressed aspects of identity?

Orion wrote:Naoto is the one I was thinking of. And if their Shadow is trans, wouldn't that strongly imply that they are trans? What with Shadow-selves typically being used to depict suppressed or repressed aspects of identity?

The Shadows are distorted exaggerations of suppressed or repressed aspects of identity. The crazed rantings of Naoto's Shadow and her subsequent behavior after integrating it and acknowledging the root aspect entirely bear out Longes' description. If Naoto were in fact trans and supressing it for the remainder of the game, she would have failed to integrate her Shadow after the boss fight and not become a party member.

Both Kanji's and Naoto's stories are about them being afraid of society not accepting them for who they are. Kanji is good at arts and crafts and likes cute things, and is scared that this is not "manly", so he builds a tough guy persona and alienates everyone. Naoto is a detective, but most fictional detectives are male, and most of the police force is male, so Naoto masquerades as a boy to be accepted. Their issues are external, comming from the society pushing gender roles on them. When they become part of the group and get friends who accept them for what they are, Kanji becomes more open about his interests, while Naoto becomes more feminine (and possibly heightens her voice pitch).

Yeah, can we not go into the clusterfuck that was GamerGate here? I'm pretty sure there's a GamerGate thread in MPSIMS if you need to say anything about it.

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:Gamergate is like the reverse Fight Club. The first rule of both gamergate and antigamergate is you don't ever shut up about it.

Gamergate is the only opening in the Gamerwall, which separates the game world from the human world. It is guarded at all times by the Gamerwatch, an elite order of Arcadian Cyber-Samurais sworn to guard the Wall at all costs. Crossing the border in either direction requires special dispensations from the King of Lime and the Emperor of Dis. Those who do not have the proper paperwork are turned away, back in the direction they came from. For these trapped on the wrong side of the wall, this is almost always fatal, but it is preferable to the 99 Needles, living death that awaits all of those attempt to breach the Wall's defenses.

Goddamnit, stop talking about that bullshit, please.

Prak wrote:

maglag wrote:Bayonetta shares the same body design as other Umbra witches, including the rival and faceless nameless mook #381. It's just how the art designers decided to roll with in that game.

Prak wrote:
Unless the game literally says "you must be born with a vagina" I still choose to believe my version. Because there's a lot of gender fuckery in old magic folk lore.

Well, a bit of spoilers, but Bayoneta at a moment of the game meets her younger self because time magic, and she's a little girl.

...what's your point?

That the standards you're using to call Bayonetta a trans could be used to call pretty much any video game female character a trans, since, for obvious reasons, no game explicitly says "this female character was born with a vagina", and the female anatomy is never represented with 100% precision by artists anyway.

Heck, people in this thread are now claiming that Samus "women can be badass too" Aran was actually a man all along.

Sure, but on the matter of Bayonetta, I'm just saying "I prefer to think of her as" rather than trying to argue that it was authorial intent. I'm sure she was always intended to be a cis-woman, but because I'd like there to be more trans characters in gaming, gay men apparently think "camp" is uniquely theirs, and a gif makes it look like she has a dick, in my mind, Bayonetta is trans. Consider her how you will.

I grew up with Sega and only a handful of games over my pre-18 year old life, so got no dog in the Samus Is Trans fight. Other than liking for there to be more trans representation in video games.

Samus isn't trans. Canonically, she's heavily genetically altered so that she can survive in environments are absurdly inhospitable and so that she can use chozo power suits. She also watched a space dragon incinerate her mother when she was three. And she has a reputation for slaughter on such a scale that the Galactic Federation sends her alone on planetary genocide missions.

She's got a lot of issues, being transgendered isn't one of them.



Oryx, The Taken King from Destiny, on the other hand, is a transman.


This guy was assigned female at birth.

The Oryx thing makes me realize that technically pretty much every devil in D&D with a sex is transgendered, since they are pretty much sexless until promoted to Erinyes or make it to Archduke.

Edit: Unless you go by Planescape fluff.

Edit again-

I suppose things are going to get better. There's a canonically trans character in a recent Magic the Gathering set, which would have been unthinkable when the game first debuted. Krem in DAI is a remarkable example as well, both for even existing, as well as for having personal reasons for not seeking gender confirming transformation which validates real trans people who have reasons for not seeking such (as surgery, rather than magic, albeit). The fact that there is a transgender npc in Pokemon is... if I didn't already know about her I wouldn't believe it (I forgot about her, but I do remember her now).

The next step is going to be playable trans characters, and potentially characters who... are recognizably shaped by the fact they're trans, if that makes sense? However their culture responds to transgenderism, that should impact the character in some way, and it should lend verisimilitude. In general, as much as any real generalization can be made, trans people have an experience growing up which differs both from their assigned and identifying gender, so regardless of where they fall in being trans, they will have had a different experience growing up from the little cis-boy or girl next door.

Of course, for the foreseeable future, any attempt to be more inclusive, and to have explicitly, canonically trans characters in a game is going to attract a bunch of "Anti-SJW" jackasses who bitch about "social justice being forced on them" even if the creator is themself trans, despite these same assholes commonly saying "if you want more diversity, make your own!" and these games will have to be able to weather that.

koz wrote:

Starmaker wrote:Max Lao from Technobabylon.

Source on Max being trans? I don't recall the game itself ever pointing it out.

I don't remember the exact scene -- maybe the murder robot room?
Max and Regis are talking. Regis talks about how oh so tormented and conflicted he is because of his Tragic Past [tm]. Then the topic shifts. Max says she studied at some sort of private school for privileged kids. Regis: "Waitwhat, isn't it a boys-only school?" Max: "It is, and at the time, I used to fit in just fine." Regis: "Oh I get it, you shared a private matter so that we'd be even and I wouldn't feel like ass." Max: "Pretty much. Yay bonding."

Dark Sun Gwyndolin.

JigokuBosatsu wrote:Dark Sun Gwyndolin.

I don't think that counts for the same reason Bridget from Guilty Gear doesn't. Gwyndolin is just a guy who happens to wear a dress.

Leress wrote:

JigokuBosatsu wrote:Dark Sun Gwyndolin.

I don't think that counts for the same reason Bridget from Guilty Gear doesn't. Gwyndolin is just a guy who happens to wear a dress.

Bridget and Gwyndolin are odd ducks in their they were born biologically male but their parents chose to raise them as female. I know that Bridget identifies as male in spite of his upbringing (but still dresses like a nun for some reason). I'm not sure about Gwyndolin.

For a while, Dungeon Magazine was doing a thing where the devils and demons were sometimes the non-canonical gender, so you sometimes ended up with stuff like female Kelvezu and stuff.

Canonically, celestials and fiends are made from both genders of petitioners (souls) and come from both genders.

I really wish we got better social information about outsiders in D&D than the weird ass crap we got in the Fiendish Codices. ...even if I totally used the Devilish Pact rules to grab a couple of extra feats in my current game...

New Guilty Gear character Kum Haehyun is a girl in an old man's body:

Steven Tyler in Revolution X.

(if real people count, that is)