Lots of people have talked about gender stereotypes in video games. Few games have uniformly positive female images that young girls can look up to. Even fewer have female lead characters who are the heroes. Boys buy most games, so characterization follows.

Why wait for the companies to fix things? Mike Hoye didn’t:

“As you might imagine I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero and rescue their little brothers,” he wrote on his blog.

Hoye decided to take matters into his own hands, and just fix the game. Since he was playing the game through emulator software, rather than on an actual GameCube, he was able to modify the games files in such a way that swapped gendered pronouns in the on-screen dialog. “Swordsman” becomes “swordsmain,” “milady” becomes “my lad,” etc.

Very cool.

(Ok, I feel obligated to say there are probably legal/copyright reasons not to do this. But still very cool.)

From John Herrman at (the oftentimes crazy) Buzzfeed via GM Seigler at parislemon.