I say it in a joking way when I say it because they accidentally fell into it, but Saints Row is the biggest franchise with a main character who is trans. You could not make a female protagonist in the first game, but you could in the second. The conceit behind the second game’s character creation is that after being caught in an explosion your character gets reconstructive surgery while in a coma in prison. Is this an extremely flimsy justification for me to use? You betcha!
Saints Row isn’t a game about being trans, and the developers weren’t setting out to comment on the trans experience, but honestly? It’s so nice to have a series of big dumb action games where you can at any time while playing the game make your character masculine or feminine or androgynous, especially in SR2 (they should never have replaced the masc/femme body slider with a binary male/female choice), either in their body shape, voice, or clothing, and it’s never treated as a joke, even in a series that really fucks up in their choices of comedic targets sometimes. Even before I fully realized I was trans and stopped being in denial about it, I loved that about Saints Row.
When I hear Dontnod tooting their own horn about having a trans character and framing it as a landmark event, all I can think is “oh boy, how are they going to screw this up,” and that sucks. I don’t want to play a game with my guard up all the time like that. I dunno. I don’t subscribe to the idea that only marginalized people can do justice to stories about characters who are marginalized in the same way they are, but if you’re out here beating your chest about having a protagonist who is trans and your head writer isn’t trans, I’m going to eye it extremely warily.
