I started replaying Pokémon SoulSilver recently as my pre-bedtime wind-down video game. I can’t explain where the hankering came for, but I really wanted to enjoy the simplicity of an older Pokémon game and so turned toward one of my favorite entries in the series. It’s old enough that I can play it on my 3DS, new enough to have a bunch of quality-of-life improvements to the series, and is from a period in my life where I could just enjoy things without being aware of what the larger world thought about them, so I’ve got no difficult feelings or frustrations to ignore while I’m trying to calm down for sleep. As I booted it up, deleted my old save file, and started a new one, I discovered quickly why it had been so long since I played a Pokémon game. I was prompted pretty much immediately to identify as a boy or a girl and that little bit of text reminded me immediately of the complicated feelings around gender in Pokémon games that I developed while playing the latest mainline entry, Scarlet/Violet. Feelings that I might have only started to properly examine in the more recent years of my life but that had been foundational and important to me as I grew up in ways that I’m still figuring out. Feelings that developed as the Pokémon franchise developed depictions of gender via it’s ability to actually present characters and Pokémon that looked different. A thing that existed in the first game as only symbols in the name/nickname entry field, symbols on the Nidoran names to tell you which one you got, and as an abstract concept which, for a long time, my childhood brain literally only understand via hair length because that was how my parents and all the media I had access to explained it: boys had short hair and girls had long hair.

As I wrote at the time of the release of Scarlet/Violet, the Pokémon games did an interesting thing when it came to your character’s gender prior to this latest generation (at least from the Silver/Gold generation onward). They prompted you to declare if you were a boy or a girl, but then all of the text in the game addressed your character in an entirely gender-neutral way. You were a “trainer” or a “champion” or a “kid” or whatever, never a “boy” or a “girl” or any other gendered term and while you did have a very different look (and some different items in the form of gendered clothing) based on what choice you made at the beginning of the game, the people and the world around you didn’t actually acknowledge the choice you made at the moment of your character’s creation. And even the aforementioned gendered items didn’t really come up until the games stopped asking if you were a boy or a girl and started asking what you looked like. Self-identification of gender as a standard concept in a children’s video game. “Wild” stuff that felt completely normal to me for the longest time, until it was suddenly missing and I noticed how much it had meant to me.

I made my peace with the sudden and drastic change in how your player character is referred to in the Scarlet/Violet games by playing as a feminine character and doing my best to ignore how the game seemed to often seek out way to reference the unknowingly gendered decision I’d made at the moment of character creation (since it still prompted you to pick what you looked like rather than declare that you were a boy or a girl), but the thoughts never really went away until I stopped playing the game and stopped thinking about it entirely. Now, as I’m diving back into a game from the period where you were still asked if you were a boy or a girl for the first time since I came out to my friends, I was faced with a decision I have grown so incredibly tired of making (mostly because I face the results of one such choice on the daily since there’s no actual pronoun selection options for Final Fantasy 14, just “male or female” model selection during character creation (and recreation)). Do I fall back on what I did for most of my life, remake the same decision I made as a child, teen, young adult, and 20-something because it was easier to just go with what society and my upbringing told me I was, or do I pick something I’d never been seen as just to avoid falling back into those same old habits and frustrations I’ve been avoiding as much as possible these last few years? Even if all that it would determine was my character model and never be referenced in any kind of gendered way ever again?

I say that like it wasn’t an easy decision, but it was. I picked the “girl” model even though I’m not a fan of how it looks and am a fan of how the “boy” model looks because I was never going to think about my character model in that level of detail again and it’s so much easier to forget about that (as signified by the fact that I literally haven’t thought about it in the weeks between making this choice and coming up with this blog post idea) but I would think about misgendering myself the way society and so many people (despite my efforts to correct them) still do every single day like I did the last time I did it (in my first, two-hour-long Pokémon Violet save file that I deleted, coincidentally). It’s easier to be called something I’m not and that society doesn’t see me as than something I spent decades pretending to be and that society refuses to not see me as.

Anyway, it turns out that my comfort zone, where Pokémon games asked me what I looked like and then basically never gendered me again outside of providing clothing that matched my chosen gender presentation, was actually a really small period of time. Sure, I can still enjoy the old games since it’s just one little choice at the start and then never referenced again, but the thought is now bouncing around in my head and I will never truly be free of it when I’ve actually been forced to make that choice. All of which has me thinking about what any new Pokémon games might do in regards to gender and gender presentation. The era of the gender neutral Pokémon protagonist might be over, which feels like such a weird step backward that I have a hard time truly believing that Scarlet/Violet was anything more than a strange fluke. It isn’t difficult to convince myself that it’s a serious problem, though, when I dig into it, given how Link went from being an incredibly neutral, ungendered presentation outside of however you chose to have the character present in Breath of the Wild and how incredibly (and miserably) gendered Link was in Tears of the Kingdom. More and more, it feels like the world as a whole is trying to lean into the binary the destructive, reactionary (and usually fascist) forces trying to control the world demand be enforced.

I don’t know that there’s much of a point to this blog post other than as a place for me to put these thoughts about gender in one of my oldest and most played video game franchises. I grew up playing these games and the experience of being a protagonist in Pokémon games was an important part of my development of self, such that I never really even noticed that I never gendered myself in my own head, nor did I feel any kind of pull toward any specific gender presentation other than what my parents and society forced on me. Pokémon was the core of my “self-insert” gaming for me entire childhood and teenage years since I didn’t really get into RPGs until later in my teen years and in college when I began to slowly explore the idea of looking like something other than the masculine “man” my parents demanded I be. Even all these years later, I still remember how ungainly and wrong a lot of the “male” self-insert video game protagonists felt, so much so that I never actually inserted myself into these charactes outside of the one time I played a Dragon Age game as a female character model (and, as I said above, the Pokémon games). Nowadays, when I can get around the binary so many of the RPGs I play still force me to pick between, I do it without hesitation and yet it still didn’t occur to me that my enduring fondness for just vibing in Pokémon games might be somehow related to all of this. Well, now I know and while I will probably continue to play SoulSilver (it’s still my favorite game in the franchise, despite the minor but still present gender issues of it all), I think I might make a conscious decision to focus any future gaming time on the part of the franchise that better maps to how I feel about myself.