Thrilling Tales of Birdo

This is a post I’ve tried to write several times, but for whatever reason no version ever made it live. I’m not sure why, because it’s good news and it’s a relatively quick message to deliver: If you were a fan of this blog and you miss my writing, I have a new blog where I’ve been writing since 2022. It’s called Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, and it’s a more concentrated version of what I did here. In fact, many of the posts I have at this new blog are expansions or revisions of ideas that I initially put on this blog, just refined and reapproached with the experience of an extra decade or two.

Foremost among these is a recent post I did about Birdo, everyone’s favorite egg-spitting dinosaur, and how she’s been fairly straightforwardly trans ever since her debut, even if Nintendo has shied away from explicitly saying so. In “A Complete History of Birdo’s Gender,” I track the different ways Nintendo has portrayed her gender identity in English and Japanese, from Doki Doki Panic until today. It’s nearly 10,000 words long, which is to say that it’s a very niche piece that I didn’t imagine would get much recognition outside of the LGBTQ gamers who have traditionally enjoyed my writing, but this one has been received with some success — and considerably more than most of my Back of the Cereal Box postings ever did. As of this morning, it’s been linked to by Critical Distance, Kottke.org and the Sunday Longreads newsletter, the last of which puts my humble nu-blog alongside some much better-known publications, so if you want to learn about Birdo from the same place where you learn about Simone Biles, check it out.

All these years later, I realize that one of the problems that kept Back of the Cereal Box from getting a wider readership is that few people actually wanted stories about video games, pop culture at large, my personal life and etymological trivia, so I decided to specialize rather than diversify. If I have something non-video game-related to share, I suppose I can do that at my personal site, which also has a blog, but this is the writing that makes the most sense for me to do now.

Here are some links to pieces that began in some form as posts on this blog back in the day.

• Sci-fi Stripteases in Barbarella, Mach Rider and Metroid
• Nintendo’s First Playable Female Protagonist Isn’t Female in Japan
• A History of Toad’s Gender… One Way or Another
• Did Super Mario Bros. 3 Change Our Understanding of the Tanuki?
• What’s With the Equals Sign in Golden Axe?
• Who Put the ‘P’ in the P-Wing?
• Is Princess Lana Based on Palutena from Kid Icarus?
• Is Samurai Shodown Referencing a Real-Life 16th-Century Cyborg?
• The Real-Life Revolutionaries Behind Charlotte from Samurai Shodown
• Why Is Super Mario Bros. 2 Missing a Level?
• If His Name Is Blanka, Why Is He Green?
• Cliff’s Notes for Dante: Final Fantasy IV’s Elemental Fiends

Plenty of pieces are wholly original, however, and as I exhaust the the ideas that initially debuted here, more and more will be.