You also have Guilty Gear's Bridget, a tween who produces a suggested Google search of "Trap," along with a lot of jokes about how gross he is ...
Google
... and whatever the fuck Final Fantasy IX's Quina is.
Squaresoft
"I self-identify as a turnip."
So it's not a terribly inspirational landscape if you're trans and looking for a character you can relate to. That's too bad, because that's part of what makes gaming so appealing -- you can control someone who's like you, but more interesting, because they're a professional demon killer and you had to spend half of last weekend doing paperwork at the DMV.
With that in mind, Amber's motivations for including a trans character, Mizhena, in her game seem uncontroversial. "I think everyone deserves to play a game that represents them in a fun fantasy setting. That's how imagination and wonder develops." There's also the issue of variety in an industry that has largely defaulted to "strapping white dude" or "voluptuous babe" for its protagonists. "Creating a wide range of characters also makes settings more complex and believable. There's a certain amount of willful blindness you have to have to believe in a video game world where the entire population is made up of one or two character models in one of five outfits. The more diverse a game world can be, the more like real people the characters become."
So Mizhena wasn't an elaborate ploy by Big Social Justice -- just one writer trying to flesh out the world she was building with a couple of quick, completely optional lines of dialogue. And yet ...
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