"True Colours": Queering Gender, Monstrosity, and Humanity in Little Nightmares II

Katie Garrett's essay offers a queer "too-close reading" of Little Nightmares II, arguing that the game's ambiguous narrative, formalist aesthetics, and collaborative dual-protagonist mechanics contain queer meanings that player discourse and official paratext have largely overlooked. Drawing on Thon's framework for indie aesthetics and on abjection theory from Kristeva and Creed, the analysis contends that the game's Otherness-coded environments and monstrous imagery make queer readings of gender and humanity available, even as promotional materials and developer language tend to reinforce heteronormative binaries. The study focuses specifically on the second installment rather than the first or third.

Central to the argument is the ambiguous design of the protagonist Six, whose gender developers reportedly intended to keep unresolved. The essay shows how store pages, marketing, and developer comments that describe the characters as "boy" and "girl" push players toward binary interpretations. Close attention to the Teacher and to Six's shifting bodily design, informed by Halberstam and Ruberg, reveals how instability at the level of skin disrupts received categories of gender and humanity.

The analysis culminates in a reading of the "Monster Six" transformation, which the author argues destabilizes the game's human/monster binary and exposes players' reliance on surface-level recognition. The ending, in which Six releases Mono and Mono becomes the Thin Man, is interpreted as a site of queer resistance to enforced gender and species categories. The essay also critiques fan theories that cast Six as inherently evil or in need of rescue, framing these as heteronormative efforts to resolve the game's deliberate ambiguity.