A Letter from My Daughter to Nintendo
This is a letter written by my 11 year old daughter to Nintendo. She doesn’t have a social media presence. When I asked her what she wanted to accomplish in writing this letter she said, “I want to have my voice heard.”
At first I wasn’t sure what to expect. When I was done reading what she wrote I was completely floored. If I am being honest, I told her that this was one of the few times she would see me cry.
To help her, we came up with a plan. We’ve recorded her reading her letter and posted that video to my Facebook page. We also talked about putting the words “in a blog.” I told her about Medium, and she thought it would be cool to share it here too.
So I’m just the dad, helping my daughter dip her toe in the world of social media, and hoping her message resonates with some of you enough to be shared or get comments. With that, here she is, in her own words:
<we’ve also tried to embed the video link from Facebook of her reading the letter>
Dear Nintendo -
Hello. My name is Casseia (pronounced CA-see-yuh), and I am Nintendo DS owner. You are launching your new game system Nintendo Switch, I am writing to you in concern about the portrayal of females in your games such as Super Mario™ and Legends of Zelda™. I am pretty certain my dad is buying your new game system, but I’m not sure I would want to upgrade from my DS because of what your games are saying to me about what a woman is. I have noticed that the females generally seen in your games are shown as princesses or queens, and are often shown, perhaps, holding a parasol, or wearing a dainty dress. I know for a fact that girls are not just that, because I am a girl myself.
We are not just some dainty thing that lives in a castle in need of rescue, or that wears a dress day in and day out. We are people who make a difference in the world, who are willing to get dirty to make our world a better place. I don’t know any girls who play golf with a crown on. We are people who are looked at funny if we want to play football or wrestle. We are capable of doing these things, and too many people in this world do not recognize this.
I have also noticed that even if the female characters are not wearing dresses or crowns, they are generally wearing tight clothes and pink or purple garments of clothing. We are not just this, and while I recognize that I have said this multiple times, it rings with truth. We are people who have the power to do anything we choose, perhaps without ribbons or superpowers. I understand that Mii females have dresses to help people depict what gender is what, and Pokemon is all about the Pokemon. Samus Aran is a little bit different, but it is a little hard to tell that she is a girl at first. Even without her suit on she is wearing a full-body leotard and has partially long blond hair, which show her feminine figure and what people think women should look like.
My request is a simple one. If you could make just one game with a girl without twirly ribbons, a parasol, a tight leotard, or even a crown, I am sure that would mean the world to millions of girls worldwide like me. I think we would all like to see one female character without anything on them that would perhaps be seen as feminine in, say, the 18th century, or anything that defined them as what too many people think of as a woman. So please, show that we are not just a princess, or a queen, or someone in need of rescue. Please give us a game that has, for example, the main character as a female scientist who uses science to save the world, or uses her own smarts and tactics without what people normally would see as feminine; a game where we are not shown as incapable of doing things that males have the full capability to do. Please show that we are capable of anything if we put our minds to it.
I am currently a STEM student in the sixth grade, and I have completed Hour of Code, CodeCombat, and have learned and am still learning with Udacity and Codecademy. I am also participating in a club called Girls who code. In the future I would like to be a software engineer, and perhaps I can even build a Switch game someday, but I’ll have to convince my dad to get me something better than my Chromebook. But if you won’t make Super Maria, I guess I’ll just have to make it myself.
-Casseia Watson, 6th Grade, Age 11
