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A Brief Look at Some LGBT Video Game Characters
In my post on video games and LGBT representation I shared some gifs of a few LGBT video game characters. Here I've provided you with a brief look at who these characters are, the games they are featured in, and their origins.
Meet Sera from Dragon Age: Inquisition: an orphaned elf raised by humans with a love for shooting things with arrows, she’s the female counterpart to Dorian (as in she can only be romanced by the same sex, their personalities are incredibly different).
From what we know, Sera didn’t have the same struggles with sexuality that Dorian did, but she’s far from the Token Lesbian stereotype.
She’s also a member of an organization called The Friends of Red Jenny, which is a secret society that aims to get back at nobles for wronging common people.
Final Fight began in arcades during 1989. The character seen here is called Poison, an orphan from Los Angeles who fights in order to stay fit. She appeared in the original Final Fight as well as Final Fight Revenge in 1999.
Concerned about how Americans would react to a game that allowed players to beat up women, the game makers made Poison a trans-woman (because that’s not as bad apparently), but the character was ultimately removed from the game.
Poison was later incorporated into Street Fighter X Tekken and Ultra Street Fighter IV.
Lieutenant Steve Cortez is mourning the death of his husband when we meet him in Mass Effect 3. In Mass Effect 3 players take on the role of Lieutenant Commander Shepard and, whether male or female, Shepard relies on Cortez as a shuttle pilot. If the player has chosen to Shepard a man instead of a woman the player then has the option to romance Cortez.
According to a Forbes article called “Mass Effect's Gay Debate Shows Gamers Have Growing Up to Do” a lot of people were upset and even disgusted by the idea of a gay romance option. The author of the article stresses that it is an option and that other gamers should really grow up—which I agree with 100%.
A waitress at the Stray Sheep, a bar from the game Catherine, Erica Anderson is an incredibly flirtatious post-operative transwoman. Catherine is an action-adventure puzzle-platformer that follows a man named Vincent, a childhood friend of Erica’s.
Catherine has been hailed as sexist by articles in both Slate and the International Business Times. In fact, in one of the articles the game was said to be “a bellwether for what tech culture and gaming have come to mean for a lot of men: a safe playspace from the realities that they believe women force on them.”
On top of that, an article on the TransGamerSociologist, a WordPress blog, wrote that Erica was “the most disappointingly handled character in the game.”
If you're wondering what happened to Ellie from The Last of Us: her little blurb turned into a page, which you can find here!
Above I’ve written about some of the LGBT characters that can be found in video games, some of them have been received better than others, and hopefully this list will grow overtime as more game makers create video games with LGBT characters.
For another look at these characters, and to see some character’s that I didn’t mention, check out this video from WatchMojo: