SunnyAgo

That’s an interesting position.

Thanks

>Chrono Trigger has Flea: a possibly-transgender boss

“As GamerGate continues to rage on in its attempt to silence women with the nerve to speak out about marginalization, replaying classic video games is an exercise in retrospective awareness.” – That’s utterly false seeing as the majority of the participants in GamerGate have ties to feminism and feminist theory.
You contradict yourself when you state, “While we don’t know how Flea identifies, we do know that s/he is a gender non-conforming character” as earlier you state, “because he is always referred to with masculine pronouns–and in Chrono Cross, in which he is a secret boss, his sex is clearly denoted as male.” So he’s not trans* he’s a cisgendered drag queen, which is perfectly fine. Even if we’re to look at him under the lens of genderfluidity, it’s a bit presumptuous to look at a character who routinely states himself to be and is referred to as a male, a say “no he’s trans.” Even in the example you give, he’s more concerned with Power rather than a gender binary. I feel like you’re watering down the trans identity by misidentifying individuals, as this would be tantamount to referring to a tomboy as a male because she get’s called male once because she’s good at something that falls into the male binary, even if this stand in contradiction to rest of your time observing her.
“Call me silly, but sometimes being blatantly insulted by your entertainment has a way of destroying its appeal.” That seems a bit silly, as even if you hadn’t play Chrono Trigger in decades it’s not going to transform into Duke Nukem. TO often people forget to look at a game for what it was, and instead look to it as what it is today. It’s why young people hated Seinfeld, or why many people turned on Belle from Beauty in the Beast. Also, to wit, at what point do you consider yourself insulted in a game? Should I be insulted by the Knuckles Rap of Sonic Adventure? Should African Americans be upset with the pandering EA did with the Street Series and Def Jam Series? I say this because the role of African Americans in gaming is usually consolidated into, “Yo son! What’s Good? Nameen? ”
All and all you have a good first article, just some hiccups that knocked me out reading for a bit.

In looking at every character’s role in the games, while Zelda is the damsel in distress, it’s not the sole motive for Link to save her. She is shown in every incarnation to be quintessential in capturing Ganon and restoring peace. Onto the other females in the you point to: I feel the need to state that Din, Farore, and Nayru in the Oracles games are NOT goddesses; it’s been speculated that they’re incarnations of the goddesses but never stated officially. They’re Oracles. They aren’t omnipotent or invincible, as a god would be, nor would it make sense for them to have that power in the games. They have some power but even if they were incarnations of the Golden Goddesses, they are not the same Din, Farore, and Nayru that created this universe; to say that the creators of the universe have fallen from grace is a bit extreme. This just comes off to me as a biased interpretation rather than an analytical interpretation. In canon, Link isn’t competent because he’s male, he’s often the only competent person outside of his allies, i.e., Hyrule’s Knights in Twilight Princess or Tetra’s pirates in Wind Waker, who are both ineffectual as a unit. Lastly, I do agree that there should be some fluidity in Nintendo’s game series, but Zelda’s creator is very much a traditionalist. Zelda on the whole has remained a pretty similar game to the original incarnation. Nintendo as a whole, really, is a company steeped in tradition. They have relied on the same formulas in their games for years; they tweak their formula with each new iteration of a game, but the formula at its base stays very much the same. I do hope that they’ll experiment with diversity in their playable characters soon, but it takes a long time for an old dog to learn new tricks.

I have to question if you played some of the source material as a lot of your points are skewed in favor of your conclusion instead of within the context of the games.

Great piece, I loved that closing section. I look forward to you writing about something that you actually enjoy.

Thank you for actually reading the article.