What if it wasnвЂ™t the bastion of girl-power I remembered? Call me silly, but sometimes being blatantly insulted by your entertainment has a way of destroying its appeal. When I sat down to replay Chrono TriggerВ last month, I was anxious. Sometimes we hold fond memories of a title, only to have them tainted when we replay it as an adult.В Some games are easy to categorize in terms of their friendlinessвЂ“or animosityвЂ“toward women, butВ we oftenВ find ourselves taken aback, whether by the pre-ESRB horror that is CusterвЂ™s Revenge, or by the emotional depth given to female characters like Final Fantasy IXвЂs Eiko and Dagger. In the years following its release, the game has been ported to a variety of different platforms, including Playstation, Nintendo DS, and Wii Virtual Console, and spawned two sequels.ДЄs GamerGate continues to rage on in its attempt to silence women with the nerve to speak out about marginalization, replaying classic video games is an exercise in retrospective awareness. Although games continued to be released for the platform until 2000, Chrono Trigger came late in the SNESвЂ™s tenure as NintendoвЂ™s flagship console, with the Nintendo 64 (N64) launching the following year. This is the environment out of which Chrono Trigger, the critically acclaimed Japanese role-playing game (JRPG), launched on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in 1995. For third wave feminists, womanhood is whatever a woman defines for herself. Third wave feminists insist that, while the category ofВ вЂњwomenвЂќВ was defined politically according to biology and socially constructed gender roles, anyone can and should be able to self-identify as a вЂњwoman.вЂќВ They embrace those thingsвЂ“such as cosmetics, brassieres, and high heelsвЂ“which second wave feminists considered oppressive and restricting. Third wave feminism, fomented in the early 1990s, sought to correct these failings. The second wave of the 1960s and вЂ™70s focused on an expression of universal womanhood, one which largely ignored the experiences of marginalized women, including: women of color, lesbians and bisexual women, lower-class women, and women outside the gender binaryвЂ“which is to say, trans*, genderqueer, and gender-fluid individuals. MuchВ of this late 20th-century social progress can be attributed to the rise of third wave feminism. Today, LGBTQ individuals and their allies continue to fight for equality based on sexual orientation and identity. Despite the tentative foothold on progress gay, lesbian, and bisexual individuals managed to achieve, however, the trans* community would not begin to see such advances until the later part of the decade. Instituted in 1994 and repealed in 2010, the вЂњDonвЂ™t ask, donвЂ™t tellвЂќ (DADT) policy wasВ an important, if controversial, step toward making military policy respectful of sexual orientation. In the mid-90s, the United States sociopolitical landscape was in a progressively transitional period. The world economy was recovering from a recession, and Western military forces occupied the Eastern Bloc and the Middle East. Looking back on it after nearly twenty years, the world as it was in 1995 is, simultaneously, almost unrecognizable and yet somehow familiar to the point of surreality. *Spoilers for theВ 1995 Super Nintendo title, Chrono Trigger.

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