"Mother"
Is Metroid's Samus Aran transgender?
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| Inside the suit |
And out of all of my favourite video game heroines that I've adored through the years—be it Marle from Chrono Trigger, Zelda from The Legend of Zelda series, or Vela from my absolute favourite video game, Jet Force Gemini—there is one that has always stood out as the figurehead of them all for me...
Samus Aran from Metroid.
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| This is a bounty hunter |
She's an intergalactic badass bounty hunter, capable of destroying entire planets and ridding those filled with virus-like, alien space scum. She's totally rad, and I love and adore her as a video game character. And I suppose there's a reason why I've always connected with her more than any other character. Recent news has come about of the possibility that Samus is, in fact, a transgender female human being. The article I linked to at the beginning of this blog entry speaks of Japanese texts in older Metroid promotional materials as being a sort of newhalf. The following is an excerpt from the article linked above:
It’s true! In 1994, the writers of the official Japanese Super Metroid strategy guide asked Metroid’s developers if they could share any secrets about the intergalactic bounty hunter. Hirofumi Matsuoka, who helped work on the original design for Samus Aran, claimed that she “wasn’t a woman,” but instead, “ニューハーフ,” or “newhalf.” This language has its own issues, but terminology used for gender in the early 90s was as different in Japan as it was in the West.It is a bit vague, yes, but when you look at her physical statistics listed in one of the images above—six feet, three inches and 198 pounds with a fairly muscular physique—one might begin to wonder or raise an eyebrow. Granted, women come in all sorts of wonderful and beautiful shapes and sizes (it's what makes us so great), but it does kind of make you question if she is or not. And it does make even more sense, considering the language used by one of her designers to describe her.
Anyhow, this is incredibly exciting for me to ponder. I've always loved Samus the most above all of my other favourite female video game leads, and now I possibly have a really great, direct connection to her. <3
See you next mission! (aka, this Friday for the EOTWP!) Be good!
