A year after a vague suggestion of queerness in the ending screen of Celeste's Farewell DLC, creator Maddy Thorson has confirmed that the platformer's female protagonist is absolutely, positively, a transgender woman.

Last September, the ending screen of Celeste's final chapter suggested that she might be Madeline's queer counterpart, with a small gay and trans pride flag on her desk. While certainly a welcome nod to the game's LGBT+ fans, it failed to fully represent the mountain-climbing lass as transgender.

Today, Thorson stated on his blog that Madeline is transgender. However, the Canadian developer did not begin with such a plan in mind, and the issue of the character's gender identity was complicated because it is inextricably linked to Thorson's own.

"During the development of Celeste, I did not know that Madeline or myself were trans. During the development of the Fairwell DLC, I began to have premonitions. After development, I learned that we both were."

Of course, it's hard to nail down a good representation; after Farewell's release, critics like Laura K. Baz lamented the game's "ambiguous" approach to queerness; Thorson "lamented the silence on the subject after Farewell's release, which He apologized to fans who "felt hurt," but Madeline's vision did not seem to materialize until some time after the DLC's release.

The post also discusses how to approach Madeline's transness, from a team that balances the character's privacy with her agency over her identity, inadvertently incorporating unsubstantiated representations long after the fact delving into the matter, to the desire not to "play second fiddle to JK Rowling" by doing so. But in the end, the team concluded that rather than "full, documented confirmation," it would simply embolden certain people to insist that the game did not adequately prove she was trans.

"If you could start over from the beginning of Celeste's development, knowing everything you know now about yourself and Madeline, would you write her differently? Yes, probably. But then again, I am a completely different person and Celeste would not be in the same game. As for me, Celeste is a picture of who I was.

Now that the important work of Madeline's gender is done, we can look forward to the important work of watching Celeste get knocked off the dance mat at next year's AGDQ.