This morning I started up the new Pokemon, and like the past couple generations it uses a "what do you look like" prompt in place of the old "Are you a Boy or a Girl?"
A lot of games are going this route, and while the body types shown are still a restrictive normative "masculine"/"feminine", overall I view it as a small positive step in the right direction to support trans, non-binary, and genderqueer folks of all sorts. And so it's pretty disappointing how quickly the game undermines that by immediately and transparently using "Look" selection as a full binary gender determination - I picked the "feminine" Look and within a few minutes I was getting addressed with "Miss", "daughter", "she/her", etc.
Games like Pokemon are stuck in a bizarre half-state of seemingly wanting to present a more inclusive experience for folks while also totally not knowing how to deliver on that in gameplay and writing.
i had to scroll allllll the way back to one of my first-ass posts i ever made on this site to rechost this, because jesus christ it's still happening.
(this is a Fashion Dreamer chost)
if you've just taken gender binary and relabeled it "Type A"/"Type B", carrying along the norms and restrictions of that binary, you haven't done anything! that's the same shit with a different name! it's a peeling, hastily applied label over "Girls and Boys"! fuck!
