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Notes -
Some random ideas. Take, adapt, or reject as you see fit:
Idea 1: Husband and wife team are doing something or other. They come under attack, husband gets blasted through his chest trying to protect his wife who gets her brain scrambled in a psi attack. Magic of sci fi, they manage to save his brain by implanting it in her body. Now he's trying to hunt down his wife's killers in her body. No one ever comments on the gender politics of the situation.
Idea 2: The character creation process is set in a kind of gene clinic where you specify how you want your character to look, then you hope in a vat, and it dissolves and regrows you to look that. And then you go out and play the game, but the gene clinic stays there and you can go and change your character at any time. At some point a character in the game decides to go to the gene clinic to change sex for whatever reason (a disguise to infiltrate somewhere?). And then they just stay in that new body.
Idea 3: Villain character is revealed to be in fact a hologram projection. The real body is plugged into a big computer thingy - and you need to fight through all the villain's robot defences to get at the vulnerable meat and bones-self. Of course, once you get there the villain is different to how they portrayed themselves.
Idea 4: You play Susie McGirl, valiantly fighting for truth and justice against the forces of evil. But TWIST halfway through the game you discover that you have been brainwashed and mind controlled this whole time, and you are actually Johnny McMale who has been used by the forces of bad and not-good! Now you need to turn on your evil controllers and bring them down!
Idea 5: You are investigating the past actions of Past Character, finding their journals or logs or whatever to try to piece together the mystery you're trying to solve. But then things click into place when it is revealed that Past Character is actually the same person as Differently Gendered Current Character! This revelation sends the game hurtling towards its third act.
Will a cairn terrier be instrumental revealing the projection?
I read the parent post as trying to navigate character diversity without it being allegorical, but from the trans-allegorical perspective there are a few games that have already attempted something in that space, with the allegory being varyingly central/subtext. Celeste for example is canonically a trans narrative but is broadly more universal than that: climbing a mountain as allegory overcoming internal conflict and self-hatreds, first as running away and then as conquest/achievement.
I'm guessing from context that something like this has been done previously?
Edit: Oh, I just looked up the breed and realised you're talking about Wizard of Oz. Duh.
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Spoilers for a 21 year old anime but in .hack//SIGN,which takes place almost entirely inside a video game, in the final episode, it's revealed that the male main character who is stuck inside the video game and has amnesia and is actually female. This is partially played as surprising because there's a romance subplot between him and a female character, so surprise same-sex relationship. But also, it's just shown in the final scene, there's no follow-up. May even be after the last dialog in the show.
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