LGBT Games History: Metroid
Metroid is a video game that has been steeped in queer readings ever since it was first released back in 1986. In Metroid you play as Samus Aran, a character that’s gender has been debated even after it was revealed Samus was a woman at the end of the first game. How? By putting Samus in a bikini of, course.
According to the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, Samus was in fact often referred to as ‘he’ in US game manuals, but ‘it’ in Japanese. It was only when you got to the end of Metroid that Samus was revealed as a woman. As I’ve not finished the game just yet, I have no real clue why Samus in a bikini was needed, but whatever floats Nintendo’s boat.
Due to her appearance in a lot of other Nintendo franchises, Samus has often been a favourite among queer women creators to pair up with other female characters in the series. From Princess Peach to Zelda, Samus is certain to have kissed at least one lady in Nintendo. Again, this is fan interpretation, but it would be a disservice to ignore Samus’ queer readings when they are prominent and continue to be so.
But why is Samus so popular when it comes to queer readings of characters? There are a lot of reasons. Some of it is simple over-sexualization of female characters by straight, male gamers. But it also helps that Samus has been suggested to be transgender by artist Hirofumi Matsuoka in a 1994 interview.
Matsuoka suggested that Samus was transgender through calling Samus a newhalf. However, it is mostly seen as a negative term, for people across the transgender-transsexual spectrum. It seems to generally refer to a trans woman possessing male genitalia, which of course isn’t negative, but with the term changing over time it is hard to pinpoint exactly what Matsuoka meant by the term.
Samus being trans is a fairly popular reading of the protagonist, with Brianna Wu and Ellen McGrody going into more detail about why they believe that Samus really is a trans woman. Naysayers have pointed towards the manga and other sources of material on why Samus is, in fact, cisgender, though Wu and McGrody have argued that cisnormative views have clouded and erased trans representation before.
Regardless of how you feel about Metroid as a series, and about Samus Aran, it would be incorrect to assume that either are not part of a long-running history of queer representation and readings in video games.
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