whoa, i got grimgrimoire a little while ago from a local retro shop but knew nothing about it, i'll look into playing it when i move and unpack my games, thank you :>

this might be a super weird one, but i was born in 1991 so bear with me -- one of the earliest works that made me start thinking about Gender Shit is probably The Lion King, because i could tell that child-simba's singing voice was a woman. this was right around the time i learned bart simpson was voiced by a woman too, so in my head child-me is going "WAIT WOMEN CAN BE BOYS?"

another fucking huge one for me was freeza in dragonball. remember, in the 90s, dub freeza was voiced by a woman. the most badass strongest bad guy!! i think roles like this helped so much with my voice dysphoria, although in my case it was so severe that only testosterone was able to fully fix it.

and then when pokemon gold/silver came out i noticed some pokemon didn't have a gender. the coolest, most powerful, LITERAL LEGENDARY pokemon were among these. so now child-me is screaming "THERE'S MORE THAN MALE AND FEMALE?" pokemon probably plays the biggest role here overall, but the ungendered legendaries was the biggest early influence for me.

one of the biggest moments i look back on a lot was renamon in digimon tamers saying that digimon don't really have gender like humans do, when asked if they're a girl. this was basically THE quote i used with my first "fur"sona, which was a chao -- they don't have genders either. turned out i was super ahead of the LITERAL CANON back then because now all chao are referred to as they/them canonically.

when you grow up trans masc in the 90's you don't really have much, except ranma 1/2, but i didn't get to watch or read much of that one until way later despite LOOKING FOR IT EVERYWHERE. [no it wasn't "banned", my parents didn't ban me from specific media, i just couldn't find copies. anime & manga was still rare.] most of my childhood/teenage exposure to that one was random dvds my brother found for me at blockbuster.

there's probably more that i'm forgetting.