Celeste's Five-Year Journey to Becoming One of the Most Important Trans Games Ever
One of Celeste’s images is also one of its most striking. Following an intense dream, Madeline awakens with tears in her eyes. She is laying in bed, looking pensive as she stares up at the ceiling. On the table is a bottle of pills. To her left is a childhood picture with her mother. You can read any number of emotions into that expression, but it’s apparent that she’s caught in a moment of reflection.
The transgender community, for its part, zeroed in on pointed cues like the trans flag on Madeline’s desk. More than a year later, Celeste creator Maddy Thorson finally acknowledged what was obvious to queer fans: Madeline is transgender.
“This feels painfully obvious to a lot of (mostly trans) people, and likewise it feels painfully obvious to me too, in retrospect. It has also become painfully obvious to me that I, myself, am trans,“ Thorson wrote in a 2020 blog post.
“But these are things that I was not aware of during the development of Celeste, where I was writing Madeline and speaking from her perspective. Creating Celeste with my friends helped me reach the point where I could realize this truth about myself. During Celeste’s development, I did not know that Madeline or myself were trans. During the Farewell DLC’s development, I began to form a hunch. Post-development, I now know that we both are.”
It was a massive moment not just for transgender gamers, but for queer gamers as a whole. It was a moment of true validation and visibility in what was broadly a mainstream game.
It’s been more than five years now since Celeste’s release and it’s tough to find a more personal and affecting representation of a trans woman’s quest for self-acceptance in games or basically anywhere else. Today, it’s one of the most popular and
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