#galestork

do you have a pic or know of a particular point in the jpn game where sylv refers to herself as a woman? im just looking for something to back me up if i ever need it. i rewatched some cutscenes w/ jpn audio & picked up on the "atashi" stuff, and i think the soldiers of smile & dave were referring to her as "onee-sama" + "sylvia nee-san" which is fantastic. it's bittersweet knowing now this whole side of her we didn't get localized, i love her but god she was robbed of really being herself :(

I can’t read/speak Japanese at all, so I can only reiterate things that other people have shown/told me.

There’s this dialogue, which I believe is from the second visit to Gondolia when she, Veronica, and Serena split up to deliver the Birdsong Nectar to Placido. She refers to herself, Veronica, and Serena as アタシたち女３人 “us three women”.

Also, I was recently told that in the Japanese Switch version, when the three of them go off to explore Gondolia in search of shops, Sylvia refers to it as a “women’s only” event. And they sing “sweets, shopping, men!” together as they trod off, to which Erik responds, "What do those three women think they're doing?" So, not only does she refer to herself with the noun “woman”, but Erik does as well.

It really is unfortunate that the localization team butchered her so badly because it would’ve been revolutionary and amazing to have a main character in such a significant RPG series be a trans woman (who isn’t treated horribly by the narrative!). I like that they made her Hispanic, because I’m Hispanic+Latine, but yeesh, at what cost. I prefer to block the entire shitty “Sylv*ndo” localization change from my mind. It’s trans erasure and it’s disgraceful, she deserved better.

We did! It was never directly stated, but in #14, Drift explained to Chromedome that he had a speech recognition program running across the ship which listened out for mentions of Overlord’s name and alerted him.

You’ve got your starting point exactly right! Verity’s story begins in Infiltration, then continues into the direct sequels, Escalation and Devastation. After that, Simon Furman’s time as writer of the books got cut short, so Verity’s story hits of a bit of a stumbling block and the situation she’s in at the end of Devastation has to be quickly wrapped up without much exposition in Maximum Dinobots.