I'm a huge .hack franchise fan. I like just about everything in it. There are a couple of black sheep in my book but overall a fantastic series. In a nutshell it's a series of anime and video games about an MMORPG that, unknown to most players, is alive in some respects and can effect people in the real world. My obsession with it started with .hack//SIGN, which is where anyone interested should start. It's story is intoxicating and, spoiler alert by the way, has one of the most interesting character points I had ever seen.
The main character, a male Wavemaster (mage) named Tsukasa, is in fact a girl in the real world. I had never really thought about it before, people playing as the opposite gender for whatever reason. Tsukasa's reason was she was raised by an abusive, alcoholic father and long story short she made a male character as an absolute escape from who she really was (As a note here is is no coincidence that I named Paradox's partner Tsukasa). As I started playing MMOs myself (Started with City of Heroes, I recommend it to anyone looking for a good entry point into MMOs) I could actually tell which female characters were guys, as they had made some obvious eye candy for themselves. Hey, it's a reason whether it's a good one or not. As you may have seen in the comic I play as girl characters.
Why? Good question. In City of Heroes it was curiosity and I found that girl characters had FAR more design options so I started making girl characters. It also doesn't help that Megatokyo and Mac Hall/Three Panel Soul both feature guys that play as girls, and I LOVE those comics to death. Deep down I have a weakness for cute things, so I don't make girl characters to have eye candy, I make them to be as real as possible. Also, as a (poor) writer, I like to come up with stories for my characters, and I found I liked writing for my girl characters not only in games but in my own stories as well. It's how the Tsukasa in my Paradox comic came to be a main character. So then it carried over into WoW and Champions Online, and probably the other MMOs that I intend to try. See?
Do I pretend I'm a girl? No. Do I hide the fact I'm a guy? Kind of, if someone asks if I'm a boy or a girl I'm not going to lie about it. I'm not really ashamed about it, but I don't like being mocked about it, either. The only game I ever got ridicule about it in was Rumble Fighter, which I don't play anymore because, I hate to break it to them, but the community is a bunch of jerks. Believe it or not my character in Rumble Fighter was male until I got enough money to purchase an additional character slot.
This doesn't just go for MMOs, by the way. In Mass Effect 1 and 2 I played as the female Commander Shepard, mainly because I thought the voice actress delivered lines better than the male one. Most of the time I find that the female characters in manga, anime, and games are more developed and interesting. In fact, one of my favorite anime characters is a girl: Shiki Ryougi from Kara no Kyoukai. Does this mean I don't like male characters? Hell no! Even though Shiki Ryougi is one badass girl, most of my favorite characters are still guys. Alucard from Hellsing is the ultimate psychotic badass. Yusuke from Yu Yu Hakusho is the ultimate smartass fighter. Kenshin Himura from Rurouni Kenshin is probably overall my favorite character of all time.
So where am I going with this? Well, going back to .hack, I recently picked up .hack//link vol. 1, a manga of the last game in the .hack franchise, and it features characters from, well, the entire franchise. This includes Tsukasa, and in the manga she gets captured the evil Schicksal guild and they manage to effect the player's memories (It's a time-space thing that leaps beyond even what the original games had the game doing to people) to the point where she regresses into believing she's a boy in the game. When she tells the one trying to take a Chrono Core from the character's body that she's a boy, he respond with "Hmph. It doesn't matter to me whether you're an e-tranny or not."
I was kinda surprised, it was a term I had never heard, but it is a term that exists and it refers to people who pretend they're the opposite gender, but not just in games, anywhere on the internet. What surprised me more is that I don't see this label applied to people like myself.
Is it because the gaming community understands that there are people like myself who just prefer female characters, or is it because they're unaware of the term as a whole and it's waiting to become to the gaming community what homosexuals are to the real world? I mean, we have enough problems with racist 12 year olds on XBox Live, we sure as hell need to hope we're not adding something else to the arsenal of the dreadful trolls of the internet. I'd like to think that, as a whole, gamers are more mature than the media makes us out to be, but dammit sometimes the things I see people say on the internet make that really hard.
I remember an episode of SideScrollers on ScrewAttack.com, I don't remember who said it, but the subject of playing as the opposite gender came up and one of them said it was "creepy" or something along those lines. Do I hold it against them? No. It's outside the boundaries of what people believe is normal, and I don't claim to be normal for even one second. But I would like to make sure no one is going to hold it against me that I'm not normal. Doesn't this argument sound familiar, by any chance? It should.
It it wrong to play as characters of the opposite gender? No. Sometimes games don't give you a choice, like in Dungeon Fighter Online if you want to be a Fighter then you're going to have to be one hideously designed girl. Does it make you gay that you play as the opposite gender? No. Despite popular belief I am strait. Is it wrong to play as the opposite gender and pretend you are said opposite? Yes. There's something very wrong with that. Once again going back to .hack (Last time, I promise), Tsukasa may have been a compelling and mysterious character, but she was a tragic character, driven to pretend she was a boy due to deep emotional scars that she eventually got help for and worked through. That is not who you want to be, is it? Your online persona can take on a life of its own, but don't distance itself so much from who you are.
Posted by Jacob on 7/22/10
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The Gender Swap Issue
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