Pokémon Scarlet and Violet’s first DLC, The Teal Masks, is lastly out, and it takes the participant and all their pocket monsters on an change scholar program to the land of Kitakami. On this wondrous land they’ll discover new Pokémon to catch, new mates to make, and, as followers have found, restrooms which might be gender-neutral.

I, like many different gamers, stumbled upon this discovery within the first 10 minutes of arriving in Kitakami, on the group heart the place my character was staying. Within the foyer, you discover three restrooms. The lads’s and ladies’s restrooms are designated by Pikachu tails, with the previous that includes the flat edge on the finish that male Pikachus have and the latter displaying the rounded, heart-shaped finish females do. The third restroom is marked by only a silhouette of Pikachu’s head, and while you look at it, the textual content reads “This restroom can be utilized by anybody!”

It’s a small factor in a universe that has definitely had queer characters and even what appear to be in-universe references to queer tradition, like ex-Galar Champion Peony presumably being a homosexual icon with a largely male fanbase. However a variety of that has been subtext, and having gender-neutral restrooms is a fairly express recognition of queer and non-binary characters current throughout the Pokémon universe. It’s nice to see, and hopefully this implies we might see an precise gender-neutral character creation possibility within the sequence’ future, with they/them or different pronoun toggles in later video games.

Even when Pokémon has saved a lot of its acknowledgment of queer id buried in subtext, the franchise has amassed a giant queer fanbase through the years, particularly surrounding the Fairy kind.

The Teal Masks is the primary of two DLCs coming to Scarlet and Violet, with the second, titled The Indigo Disk, set to launch later this yr. Collectively, they make up the Hidden Treasure of Space Zero enlargement that wraps up the story of the primary sport.

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