Early videogame trans women: Frozen Half (1990/1997)

I still plan to write more on my series about early videogame lesbians, but today I want to highlight this enemy character from the Castlevania series who, like many early trans characters, started her existence as an unfunny bigoted joke, but then transcended the meanness by the sheer presence and glory of her gender. I'm talking about the Icy Chick, the Evil Ghost who Transitioned, the Snow Fairy herself: Frozen Half, from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

The "Symphony" bestiary entry for Frozen Half. She's a tall, beautiful lady with tanned skin and light blue hair, wearing a long robe that exposes one of her attractive long legs. The description reads: “An evil New Half spirit who wields power over ice. A minion of Galamoth.”

I don't have a series on early videogame trans women because there's not a lot of them, and they have been discussed elsewhere. The oldest I know of is Catherine/Birdetta/Birdo (1987~1988), the pink dinosaur from Super Mario, followed by drag queen Tessy LaFemme, the damsel-in-distress that you rescue as lesbian butch detective Tracy McDyke in the seminal Caper in the Castro (1988)—it's lovely how the very first cis lesbian and human transfem characters were in a relationship of deep companionship while fighting capitalists. Then we get sex-worker-coded and beloved sex icon Poison from Final Fight (1989), and Yasmin, the trans girlfriend of the cis guy protagonist in cyberpunk RPG Circuit's Edge (1990).

But I haven't seen much discussion of Castlevania's Frozen Half (1997, but with roots in 1990). As a Brazilian I had the privilege of playing Akumajō Dracula-kun (today fan translated as “Kid Dracula”) on the Famicom, and I did catch the reference to the boss Galamoth in Symphony of the Night, but somehow this absolutely amazing girl and her implied development went right over my head. I only found out about her recently, and only because the wikis explicitly pointed it out.

Dracula-kun was Konami's own parody of the Castlevania series, back when it had barely even become a “series”. You play as young boy Dracula saving Earth from evil galactic conqueror Galamoth, because it's your Earth and you are going to be its evil conqueror. There's lots of fun jokes and cute references in this fun little game, but one of the jokes is grossly queerphobic. You might have heard of the Japanese folkloric creature Snow Woman (“yuki-onna”), a beautiful, snow-white ethereal lady who appears in winter promising a bit of warmth only to lure men (and, presumably, lesbians) into a deathly icy embrace. Well Dracula-kun has yuki-okama enemies, instead of yuki-onna. “Okama” is a gender identity somewhat close to the Latina travesti or, a bit more distantly, to crossdressers or drag queens: someone assigned male who dresses with fem clothes and performs an exaggerated femininity. The intended joke being that instead of an alluring snow-woman you're getting some funny snow-transvestite. The low resolution of the Famicom spared us from a mean caricature with a beard shadow or something, but the manual illustration made the joke clear.

The original Yuki-okama ("Snow Crossdresser"). The 8-bit pixel art doesn't convey the idea of being a homophobic joke; honestly you can barely even tell if the enemy is intended to be human-like. She's a squat, angry-looking humanoid figure with blue skin, and no distinguish gender features except a kimono bow on her back.

Then many years later, in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the Playstation 1, there's a beautiful ice witch enemy called Frozen Half, and the in-game lore describes her as a servant of Galamoth—that is, she's working for the alien endboss from Dracula-kun, rather than under Dracula like all other enemies—and still I failed to connect the dots.

Frozen Half's ultimate power, “Saidai Power” (“Ultimate Power”), rains huge chunks of ice on the head of protagonist Alucard. In retrospect, we can see that her voice is intended as a perceptibly transfem voice. Video from completezukan.jp.

The word “half”, or more precisely “new half” (in English in the original), is an outdated Japanese term for trans women, in the sense of someone who has gone through medical feminisation procedures to transition from their assigned gender. This blue-haired lady is none other than the yuki-okama from Dracula-kun! Despite being an intangible spirit she got (ectoplasmatic?) HRT in the time between the two games, and I’m happy for her and I love her.

A sprite sheet showing various poses of New Half with her glorious flowy long light blue hair and blue-white robes, as well as some of the ice blocks and black holes she can summon.