GAMER LOUNGE 20XX (NO CASUALS!!)

[Kosheh]

Wow this is rare, Kosheh ranting about videogames!!!

so I usually don't get all bent out of shape because I'm not like an SJW or anything, but I've been playing through this game, Azure Striker Gunvolt. It's actually pretty good, but there's one midboss which really bothers me. Like, it's not the character itself at face value, but the unnecessary fluff they had to add to the character to make xem (YUP) unique.

Alright - so in the game there's the "Sumeragi" bosses, which I presume they're like the major-plot-point boss battles before tackling the big bad boss. You fight one at the beginning in the tutorial level, and there's one after you beat all eight "master" adepts (?).

This is the one you fight after defeating your fourth adept. Their name is Zonda.

Zonda is an mirror-based, illusion specialist adept. Your debriefer, a chipper brunette, refers to Zonda as a "bigender" adept with the "xe/xem/xyr" pronoun. I presume this means that Zonda identifies as both male and female, transitioning between them as xe pleases. I don't particularly have any jaded views on gender identity - in fact, I thought this was fairly progressive for a developer to present a transgender character in a neutral light (and as a good, sinister villain) and have other characters refer to them as their preferred pronoun.

However, that doesn't really seem to be the case. Halfway through the level, I met Zonda in their adept form, and I was...fairly appaled by the character design.

Character design is NSFW? Get ready to awkwardly explain GIANT PINK CODPIECES to your boss

Both characters are drawn in this art, mind - but you never see the female form. The female form is in the character's promo art, in one of his illusion mirrors. That makes me wonder if the "bigender" term is used in the Japanese version of this game.

The character has a BRIGHT PINK SWORD FOR A CODPIECE AND XE FLIES THROUGH THE AIR THRUSTING AT YOU
WHY

Your character's dialogue with Zonda is actually what really rustled my jimmies.
Here's the actual dialogue; I didn't edit any of this I swear:

Zonda: "You're all boy aren't you?"
Gunvolt: "And I hear you're a little bit of both."
Zonda: "That's right...
A plug for every socket and a socket for every plug.
I should warn you--I'm carnal. I'm a carnivore.
And right now,you're a dangly little piece of meat.
Taking you for a tug is going to be fun..."

I'm just gonna say right now that this bothers the everloving SHIT out of me. First off, it's not even heavily stated that they're proficient with mirrors - the second screen of dialogue from your debriefer tosses out that they're bigender. Because who CARES that you're gonna get stuck in mirage mirrors halfway through the level what's more important is THE CHARACTER'S GENDER IDENTITY

(Another thing that gets me is how military specialists are using proper gender-neutral terms to describe their enemies? While that's really nice of the localization team, I feel like in a military setting, they'd want to use "they/them/their" pronouns if anything, especially if they wanted to shroud the character's gender in mystery)

Secondly, the interaction you have with the character BAM, IMMEDIATELY focuses on Zonda's gender identity, and immediately gets overtly sexual.

I'm not even like an SJW or anything , and I'm feeling pretty empathetic for anyone who MIGHT be offended because the character, who actually had a chance to be a GOOD, transgender character within a videogame is immediately trivialized into a mockery of the discussion on gender identity and a caricature of the gender issues that SJWs feel so strongly about.

Oh and it gets worse (this is an actual spoiler)

You finally get up to Zonda to find that xe's been defeated (killed even?) by the character who turns out to be your rival through the rest of the game

Like, this is legitimately worse than Birdo crossdressing. This character outright feels like a joke. It's like transploitation or something.

Is it weird that I feel this way? It seems like I'm the only person on the Internet who's made a stink about it.

The actual saddest part is that this happened at Comcept. For summary, the US Community Manager, Dina Abou Karam, is known for being a radical feminist, and fights pretty hard for gender representation in games, so much as to alienate some of the backers of Mighty No. 9 as she made it feel more like she was pushing her agenda onto Comcept.
I don't know if this is tied into that - like, obviously the character wasn't created due to Dina joining Comcept! But all the dialogue pertaining to Zonda feels like it was shoehorned in and purely exists in the script for some kind of "adding for the hell of it" - it seems more like exploitation of the issue to me.


final words: leo from tekken 6 is a perfect way to present a transgender character. namco did it. it's not that hard.