After a four-year hiatus, the galaxy’s greatest bounty hunter, Samus Aran, is back. Metroid Prime 4, the latest entry in the long running Metroid video game series, hit store shelves last week, exposing more players to a female character who made gaming history nearly four decades ago.
But the release of Prime 4 has also resurfaced an insidious attempt by LGBT activists to rewrite Samus, insisting that the franchise’s trailblazing woman is, in fact, a man.
The claim first appeared in 2015, when man in a dress Brianna Wu co-authored an article for The Mary Sue titled “Metroid’s Samus Aran is a Transgender Woman. Deal With It.” Activists kept the theory going, including lesbian outlet Autostraddle listing Samus on its 2023 list of top transgender video game characters.
Wu’s article returned with a vengeance with the release of Prime 4 as one of the game’s credited narrative writers reposted it and tweeted support of the transgender Samus theory. In a post that has since been deleted, writer Megan Fausti wrote “I honestly love the idea that Samus is a trans woman. In my mind, she is and always will be.”
Fausti was joined by yet another man in a dress, Oliver Thorn, better known by his YouTube moniker Philosophy Tube. Following Prime 4, Thorn told hobby website The Gamer “I still think Nintendo should come out and tell us what we already know, which is that Samus is trans.”
Replacing Strong Women
But what these gender gremlins ignore is how Samus’ identity as a woman was one of the first great shockwaves in gaming. Many early gamers assumed the badass warrior blasting enemies to bits had to be a man. Indeed, the manual for the first Metroid game released in 1986 repeatedly referred to Samus as “he,” attempting to hide the woman underneath the suit.
As the series continued, Samus’ status as a specifically female warrior became increasingly crucial to her identity. 1994’s smash hit Super Metroid saw Samus take on a motherly role towards a baby extraterrestrial, directly aping Sigourney Weaver as Ripley from horror flick Aliens (1986).
Samus paved the way for women protagonists in gaming, as the success of Super Metroid proved gamers were not averse to female characters taking the lead. After Super Metroid, gamers troved for treasure with Lara Croft in Tomb Raider (1996) and survived a zombie infested hellscape with Jill Valentine in Resident Evil (1996). Both games were wildly successful, proving women in gaming were here to stay, thanks in no small part to the initial exploits of Samus Aran.
Samus deserves better than rainbow cultists’ deeply depressing vision of “progress;” i.e. replacing her with a mentally ill man. The vision comes off especially strange since leftists call for more depictions of strong female characters in gaming.
Wu himself has advocated for more women in gaming, arguing that the hobby has been dominated by “toxic male gamers” for decades.
Pigeonholing Women
Even if one agrees with Wu et al. that more representative women in gaming is better, it sure seems like they want to pigeonhole women into a tiny little box. Strong female characters like Samus can’t be women, they must actually be men. Simultaneously, activists claim that girly female characters are sexist and reductive. So women in gaming can’t be too tough or they’re actually men, or too feminine or they’re problematic.
Not very progressive, Mr. Wu!
Thankfully, Nintendo appears to be holding strong against the woke hordes. Samus isn’t a man in Prime 4, though activists like Fausti and Thorn wish it were so. Prior to the Samus as transgender rumors, radicals attempted to foist transgender actor Hunter Schaefer into the role of Princess Zelda in the upcoming live-action Legend of Zelda movie. Nintendo definitively squashed that by casting actual woman Bo Bragson.
Nintendo understands what radicals do not. Samus belongs to the players who admire her as a beloved, strong female character. It seems obvious that if leftists really cared about female representation in gaming, they would celebrate Samus rather than try and make her a man.
Samus is a woman, and a woman who has achieved great things for her sex in the gaming sphere. She must stay that way.
