Metroid & Gender Grooming in Videogames

2,144 words

Nintendo’s big Christmas 2025 videogame release is Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, a sci-fi exploration adventure in which female intergalactic bounty-hunter Samus Aran fights various hideous alien beings like Space Pirates, Metroids, and Mexicans (more on such videogame-based anti-immigrant memes later on). You wouldn’t immediately know Samus is female, however, due to the bulky nature of her rather masculine body-armor and visored helmet. This fact has allowed the usual gang of activist loons to pose the question: is Samus actually trans?

The first game in the series, called simply Metroid, appeared on Nintendo’s original NES console in 1986 and came with an instruction booklet which misleadingly used either male pronouns (in the West) or gender-neutral ones (in Japan) to describe Samus, the idea being that, once the player completed the game, they would gain a massive surprise when Samus finally removed her space-suit to reveal a bikini beneath, meaning you had been unknowingly pretending to be a girl all along. Some took this as a feminist message on Nintendo’s behalf, but the company’s designers simply thought it would be a “cool” shock-twist for an ending, the gaming equivalent of The Crying Game, in 8-bit genital reverse.

Oh, Mr Wu!

For the 1994 16-bit SNES sequel, Super Metroid, Nintendo published a Japan-only tie-in guide-book featuring maps and Q&A sessions with the developers. One Nintendo graphic artist, Hirofumi Matsuoka, was asked if there were any secrets about Samus only he knew. Hirofumi answered “She’s a Newhalf!”, a mocking Japanese term essentially meaning “She’s a tranny!” This was obviously just a joke, something Matsuoka felt compelled to confirm in a subsequent interview.

Why did Matsuoka need to confirm this? Because, over two decades later, in 2015, a transgender videogame programmer called Brianna Wu co-wrote an article in feminist publication The Mary Sue, proclaiming that, as the piece’s headline blared, “Metroid’s Samus Aran is a Transgender Woman: Deal With It’. Wu (born John Flynt) is a left-winger who had previously tried to stand as a Democrat candidate for Congress, although he has since fallen out with the party over his pro-Israel stance. He is also very worried that rogue astronauts – or maybe even Zebesian Space Pirates – may one day drop large rocks onto Earth from the moon, crushing our cities with the force of hundreds of nuclear bombs. Perhaps a Zionist astronaut will drop one on Palestine and solve the whole issue for good?

Wu’s main piece of evidence Samus is trans was Hirofumi Matsuoka’ 1994 quip, although even Wu himself admitted “It’s possible to interpret this as an ugly joke about Samus’ traditionally masculine appearance … equivalent to Matsuoka laughing and remarking, ‘Yeah, Samus has a dick!’”. The other best argument Wu had that Samus is transgender was that Nintendo originally made the character that way, then subsequently backtracked, but heterosexual male Metroid fans could never admit this, as they had subsequently masturbated over instruction manual images of Samus shorn of her spacesuit, thus making them all unknowingly gay, a “fact” they just could not bear to admit:

Over the years, Nintendo has slowly altered Samus’s design into a petite blonde woman with large breasts. Finding her sexually attractive, some gamers are flat-out uncomfortable thinking about her as a transgender woman.

Wu reproduces a social media exchange in which a skeptical Metroid player points out to a trans activist that, in cinematic flashback scenes in certain series entries, Samus is clearly depicted as a little girl. The trans activist’s response is to feign surprise that Nintendo included a depiction of a three-year-old child’s genitalia in the game.

Wu’s point is that we all simply automatically presume any given normal videogame character is “cisgender”, based upon how they present visually, when, in fact, none of us have ever seen Super Mario’s penis or Princess Peach’s vagina, so how do we know for sure? Have any Metroid players ever medically examined Samus’ genitals? No, of course not – so Wu rests his case, calling all arguments to the contrary trans “erasure”. A mentally normal person may argue back that, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is incumbent upon someone who claims the duck is really an elephant in disguise to provide some actual proof of this theory – but, as Wu quotes another activist as saying, “Requiring proof is hugely problematic.”

This is very handy, as it allows endless subsequent articles to be published on websites like Gayming Mag, arguing likewise that Samus is transgender, based on little more than references to Wu’s original piece. One such trans gayming journalist is “called” Aimee Hart, and, armed with the idea of proof now being “hugely problematic”, Aimee can argue with a straight (or otherwise) face that:

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.

If you click on the link on the word “disservice” above, it takes you to a deviant fan-art cartoon someone completely random once did of Samus kissing another ostensibly female Nintendo character, Princess Zelda. And this “queer reading” is all the proof you now need that Samus is indeed queer. If I draw a picture of Samus sucking off Pac-Man, would that turn her straight again?

Womb Raider

Academics are now funded by taxpayers to think like this too. Phoebe Toups Dugas is an Associate Professor in the “Department of Human Centered Computing” at Australia’s Monash University, whatever that is. Phoebe particularly “studies how to make games and interactive systems more inclusive, centering designing for transgender euphoria.” Look at the final sentence on her official online academic profile in order to gain a picture of just how serious a scholar Phoebe truly is:

“Also, she loves dragons.” Maybe her next project will be to make Spyro go gay too? She’s already done it with Samus, contributing a full chapter to the 2018 gayming textbook Queerness In Play, entitled ‘The Big Reveal: Exploring (Trans)Femininity in Metroid’. Here’s the abstract:

When 1986s Metroid revealed Samus Aran as a woman, it was cited as one of the biggest shocks in video game history. Years later, Hirofumi Matsuoka, one of the games initial designers, referred to Samus as a “newhalf”—a Japanese term for a transgender woman. Our chapter explores these two revealing moments—one as woman and one as trans—playing on our typical understanding of video games and their audiences, as well as the audience’s notion of gender identity. The big reveal trope can be a visual rendering of the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative so common in transgender storytelling, while simultaneously using Samus’s reveal to reinforce the typical hegemonic masculinity at the center of most video games.

What does Toups mean when she talks of “centering designing for transgender euphoria”? She means campaigning to have more transgenderists parachuted into videogames, to foster “joy, comfort and wellbeing” amongst trannies when they play one and realize the main protagonist is mentally ill like they are. When you play a videogame, you inevitably align your bodily identity temporarily with that of the main character you control, which does have innate role-playing potential for emotionally disturbed men who want to pretend their off-screen physical frames magically align with those of female player-characters onscreen, like Lara Croft from Tomb Raider.

But when the main character occasionally happens to be trans, this feeling can be heightened even more, creating a moment of “gender euphoria”, defined as being “a moment ‘in-game’, where your [off-screen] identity and your [on-screen, embodied] experience of your identity are truly aligned.” These instances of “satisfaction and relief caused by self-actualization and gender congruence” are described as being “bright, intense moments, wonderful moments.” This is as opposed to instances where the effeminate, trans-aspiring player, is cruelly forced to play as a character who is the opposite of their off-screen gender-ID, a big hulking hairy male like Zangief from Street Fighter II, say.

Instead, designers should, for the continued mental safety of their vulnerable trans players, include many more transgender player-characters, which are currently rare options, lest their queer fan-base turn the console off, slit their wrists, and shout “Game Over!” forever. Significantly, as a key example of “gender euphoria” in her own gayming life, Dugas cites the childhood example of completing NES Metroid and finding out, beneath her space-armor, Samus wore a space-bra.

Fausti-an Bargain

The next logical stage in this process is for left-wing activists to penetrate the videogame industry and begin agitating to do just as Dugas recommends. One such industry infiltrator is queer videogame scriptwriter Megan Fausti, (Newhalf pronouns ‘they/their’), who resembles something from Cyberpunk 2077:

An advocate for “weirder, more compassionate games”, as opposed to simply good ones, what titles has Fausti worked on down the years? None other than Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, during her time (now ended) at the game’s US developer for Nintendo, Retro Studios, for which she is specifically credited as a writer.

This is a little alarming as, Metroid fans discovered, Megan had read Brianna Wu’s 2015 essay claiming Samus was transgender, and responded with a tweet expressing the belief that “Samus is and will be transgender”, a reply Wu himself liked.

Thankfully, Fausti doesn’t appear to have succeeded in forcing Nintendo to commit commercial suicide by making Samus actually go trans in the game, but there is no guarantee future queer entryists will not be more successful.

The Halo Effect

Another popular sci-fi shooter franchise, Microsoft’s XX/XY-Box hit Halo, has run afoul of fans in recent years due to stunts such as rainbow-colored gay costumes being made available for player characters to wear.

🌈 Happy Pride Month 🌈

Embrace love, diversity, and inclusion by equipping the Unity ‘24 armor coating, nameplate, and emblem in Halo Infinite this June.

Let’s stand together in honoring our LGBTQIA+ community and forging a future of unity and acceptance for all.#Pride2024 pic.twitter.com/hspti2lRRP

— Halo (@Halo) June 1, 2024

DEI developers also began rewriting Halo’s main protagonist, a male super-soldier in space-armor called Master Chief, as less of a lone, masculine super-hero, and more of a neutered, feminized figure – “a weak, self-doubting shell of the character” he used to be, according to the musical composer of the initial games in the series, Marty O’Donnell.

The 70-year-old O’Donnell made news in November by standing for Congress himself, just like Brianna Wu had once done, but for diametrically opposed reasons: being a MAGA Republican, he wanted to make games less woke and queer, not more. Now retired, O’Donnell had seen firsthand the beginning of the “cancer” of DEI in the industry:

Instead of hiring people who played videogames, corporations began requiring ‘diversity’ at the expense of game quality. The corporate demand of hiring quotas meant more and more employees in charge of creating games not only didn’t play games, they didn’t even like videogames, and they certainly didn’t understand the audience … It’s hard for [mentally normal] gamers to immerse themselves in a game when they are required to choose a ‘body type’ … and provide pronouns for their character at the start.

The motto of Halo developer Bungie went from “We make games we want to play” to “We create worlds that inspire friendships.” Yet that isn’t what most Halo gamers want to do: they want to shoot ugly killer aliens in the face. The series’ contemporary developers may not understand this, but MAGA memesters in the White House do, hence them exploiting the recent announcement of a Halo remake to pump out memes depicting President Trump as the original, non-gaybow, Master Chief:

Power to the Players https://t.co/GqNu0qdgmw pic.twitter.com/4Hw6G7i7aW

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 27, 2025

The border-controllers of Homeland Security went further, exploiting the fact Master Chief fights an army of invading sub-human aliens called The Flood to imply that joining ICE would be a good way for any right-thinking young anti-DEI gamers to get to shoot floods of killer aliens dead for real:

The actual Halo developers were not pleased, calling ICE’s campaign “absolutely abhorrent”, one saying that “The Flood are evil space-zombie parasites, and are not an allegory to any group of people.” Not even Somalis?

As per usual, it is perfectly fine to interpret cultural artefacts through a left-wing lens, like transgenderism, but not through a right-wing lens, like anti-immigrationism. When Marty O’Donnell responded by saying he stood ready to fight alongside Trump “to destroy The Flood once and for all!” he and his kind were inevitably called fascist.

I was going to end this piece by joking ICE should really put out a further Pokémon-inspired meme captioned “Gotta Catch ‘Em All!”, but stand amused to find they have already done so! I’ll have to settle for suggesting they build a new Mexican border wall entirely out of Tetris blocks, then.

For more pieces of mine on idiots queering videogaymes, see here, here, here, here and here.