Drag Her brings drag culture to fighting games

theverge.com:

You might not assume there’s a huge overlap between drag and fighting games. One involves dressing up to express extreme caricatures of gender expectations that’s associated with LGBTQ+ culture; the other involves knocking seven shades out of each other with hyper-violent adrenaline and where busty female characters are often designed for the gaze of pubescent boys. But perhaps fighting games, with their larger-than-life flamboyant rosters, are actually more drag than you think.

“Fighting games are so known for these really hyper-feminized versions of women or hyper-masculine versions of men, so it kind of plays with gender in ways that you didn’t really think of,” says Jessica Antenorcruz, narrative designer at Fighting Chance Games. “So it makes total sense to me when we talk to a lot of drag queens or kings, they look up to fighting game characters as being very dramatic and beautiful — and then kick the crap out of them!”

But even if the LGBTQ+ community may embrace Mortal Kombat’s Sindel, who uses both her voice and hair as weapons, as a drag icon, much of that has been dependent on the audience projecting their interpretation of any scant queer-coded signifiers available. And while queer representation has been gradually improving in mainstream gaming, from Ellie in The Last of Us to the bisexual paradise of Hades, these are still games led primarily by cis-hetero men.

Drag Her, in comparison, doesn’t hide the fact that it is proudly camp and queer. It’s a 2D fighting game featuring a cast entirely of drag performers, while the core of the new indie studio behind it, Fighting Chance Games, is comprised of LGBTQ+ folk, women, and people of color, with a deep love for the drag community. More importantly, the