The Endless Possibilities of Transness in Sonic Unleashed
Sonic Unleashed (Sonic Team, 2008) is a mediocre mainline entry in the Sonic the Hedgehog Franchise, released across a variety of consoles, including the Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 2 and 3, and mobile phones. It’s a game that is sometimes fun, when it isn’t forcing the player to do a lot of slow, time-consuming platforming in a series famous for its speed. But games don’t have to be fun to be beloved, and they don’t have to be well constructed to be meaningful, with Unleashed’s themes resonating beyond (and in some ways because of) the limitations in its gameplay.
In Sonic Unleashed, Dr. Robotnik has once again stolen the Chaos Emeralds from Sonic and in doing so drained him of his Super Sonic powers. As a side effect of this process, Sonic is transformed into a beast - the Werehog - under the moon each night. This is a hindrance to Sonic, but also lends him new strength and power as he tries to reclaim the Chaos Emeralds and prevent Eggman from releasing the evil Dark Gaia. Sonic and his colourful cast of friends must travel the globe to return light to the world, rebuild the broken planet, and stop Eggman before it’s too late.
Convoluted plot details aside, Sonic Unleashed is about transformation and monstrosity. The game operates on a day-night cycle, where you play as Sonic during the day and the Werehog at night. In his Werehog form, Sonic is viewed as a monster, his new appearance terrifying the characters around him. His cutscene dialogue communicates frustration at the involuntary changes of his body and at not being recognized as himself. Through the Werehog, Sonic Unleashed asks: what does it feel like when your body looks and acts in ways you don’t recognize? What does it mean to be seen as something that you know you aren’t? What is a monster? And what does it mean to suddenly become one?
If you’re trans, some of these sentiments may be familiar.
Long before the Werehog, transness and monstrosity were already deeply intertwined. During the rise of feminist transphobia in the 1970s, Mary Daly and Janice G. Raymond used Frankenstein’s monster as a figure in their writing to depict trans women’s bodies as dangerous and unnatural (Monster, Anson Koch-Rein). The monster acts here and elsewhere as a figure of difference and deviance. It embodies that which those who are “normal,” or more aptly those who have normative genders and gender presentations, find to be distasteful, unnatural, threatening, frightening, and inhuman.
Trans folks have also moved towards the figure of the monster. Trans historian Susan Stryker took back Frankenstein’s monster in her influential 1994 essay My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix, which uses the monster to embody transgender rage towards a dominant society that denies trans people recognition of our identities. Likewise, monstrosity has been reclaimed by trans writers and artists as a metaphor to describe feelings of gender dysphoria and experiences of transphobia and social alienation. The monster can even be a symbol of trans resistance, a way of rejecting the oppressive gender binary and embracing an identity that cis society finds freakish and repulsive.
In Sonic Unleashed, the Werehog emerges to unintentionally embody many of the same things. Sonic’s sudden and non-consensual changes in appearance resemble the trans experience of puberty, when your body may begin to develop in ways you don’t want that leave you feeling monstrous in your own skin. Even as his friend, Chip, tries to reassure him by saying “you only LOOK really scary, Sonic…inside, you’re the same as ever,” Sonic’s reaction to not being recognized as himself is to groan in frustration and slink away, depressed. Sonic’s reaction here is an assertion that he is not the Werehog, that this body isn’t his and he doesn’t want it to be. This can be read as a parallel to gender dysphoria, which is a feeling of unease or distress because of a mismatch between a person’s assigned sex at birth and their gender identity.
The trans sensibility that permeates Sonic Unleashed doesn’t end with its story. It carries over into the gameplay of the Werehog stages, where Sonic gains new abilities by embracing his monstrosity.
Unleashed gets a lot of flak for failing to integrate its two different types of gameplays. The daytime sections are lauded for being fast and fun, with loops, speed boosts, and seamless perspective shifts. Matt Casamassina from IGN describes them as undeniably great and executed so well that “they not only successfully capture the frantic pace and addictive play mechanics of the long-gone classics, but surpass them.” These levels were precedent setting and paved the way for modern 3D Sonic titles to come.
Things begin to unravel in the nighttime levels, which ask the player to do platforming at a walking-pace. Tom McShea from GameSpot calls the Werehog stages extremely tedious and arduous, as they “take far longer to complete than the sprint-to-the-finish-line hedgehog races” and consist largely of “mindlessly tapping two attack buttons with an occasional jump thrown in for good measure.” Casamassina delivers perhaps the worst insult a Sonic game can receive as he writes that “the Werehog sucks the speed right out of the game, effectively transforming a Sonic the Hedgehog experience into something much slower and far less desirable.”
While certainly an issue for playability, there is something about these drastic shifts in gameplay and the way the player stumbles to keep up with them that feels delightfully trans.
Unleashed tries and fails to find convergence between two things that don’t align. The clunky, awkward stops and starts of the Werehog stages remind the player that this isn’t Sonic’s true form. This is not who he is, really. They’re uncomfortable, frustrating, and a stark contrast to the quick, fluid motion of the daytime levels. This is unintentional and a side effect of poor game design, but it pushes the player to embody a certain level of bodily discomfort through the frustration of playing a game that’s controls don’t respond how you want them to or think they should.
We could read this incongruity as an extension of Sonic’s own misalignment in the Werehog sections, between his body and his sense of self. Sonic expects his body to look and act in ways he is familiar with, as does the player, but the Werehog moves differently, unrecognizably. A body that doesn’t match producing frustration and discomfort? This is a dysphoric experience.
Where Unleashed’s trans allegory reaches its climax for me is, fittingly, in its credits song, Endless Possibility by Tomoya Ohtani and Jaret Reddick. This heartfelt rock ballad is about embracing the possibilities of what your body can be and who you can become, the potential already existing inside you. While this may be literally referring to the Werehog powers that Sonic unleashed during the game, the lyrics speak to something intrinsically trans.
I see it, I see it, and now it’s all within my reach
I see it, I see it now, it’s always been inside of me
And now I feel so free
Endless possibility
These lines always feel like a call to me and trans folks everywhere to embrace the possibilities of our bodies. Beyond experiences of dysphoria or alienation, this is what transness is – the possibility of becoming. This may be enacted through medical transition, but it doesn’t have to be. What matters is that we explore the possibilities for our bodies and our genders, as they already exist within us, and they are endless.
We've all gotta start from somewhere
And it's right there for me
The possibilities are never ending
References
Koch-Rein, Anson. “Monster.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, vol. 1, no, 1-2. 2014, pp. 134-135.
Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies, vol. 1, no 1, 1994, pp. 237-254.
Danny McLaren (they/them) is a queer, trans, and non-binary writer and gamer. They have an MA in gender studies, with a focus on trans and queer game studies. Keep up with them on Twitter @dannymclrn.
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