Marvel’s Midnight Suns succeeds in having a non-gendered player character
Firaxxis’ latest game, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, released on Friday. It’s a strategic deckbuilder, but it also includes several RPG elements like upgrading equipment and building relationships with your super powered teammates. It also gives players a self-insert protagonist in the form of the Hunter, whose appearance can be somewhat customized. The nice thing about this player character is that even though their body types aren’t all that diverse, they are a truly non-gendered character, unlike the player character in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, for example.
You don’t actually take control of the Hunter until after a few tutorial missions in Marvel’s Midnight Suns. For plot reasons, this is because they’ve been in a deathlike slumber for the past 300 years and had to be reawakened to help fight Lilith off again. Once the Hunter is called back from pseudo-death, we get to decide what they look like. This starts by choosing between an assigned female body and an assigned male body, though neither are labelled in any way at all. The game simply asks players to choose one of the two. From here, your character is truly customizable, though the in-game options are somewhat limited, as you can put whatever hairstyle or facial hair you want to on them, regardless of the body you chose.
Going forward, the other superheroes you meet and team up with as the Hunter only refer to you with “they/them” pronouns. You get an occasional “’em” thrown in there, but there’s never any she/her or he/him-ing in the game. All of the heroes around you, from the snarky Tony Stark to the jock energy Captain Marvel, respect this and never refer to you as anything other than “they/them.” This is an exciting approach in a AAA game with the Marvel branding all over it, and hopefully it will be a trend that continues going forward.
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