so, the final shape teaser trailer dropped yesterday, the final expansion for destiny's decade long story arc. it left me cold. as the game trends towards microtransactions and crossovers and simplifying the complexity of the background story, thinking about why i stuck with it for so long even as i feel my foot out the door now.
part of why i stuck with it through the years, even beyond the friendships i made with other players, speculating on where the story would go, the appeal the gameplay held for me, was something surprisingly personal.
two, dueling impulses that seemed contradictory when i tried to apply it in real life: i want to be strong and protect my friends from danger, i want to be perfect and unemotional. a being made of iron, more machine than woman.
i want to be feminine and pink and gentle, adorned with flower petals and filigree and live a life of peace and honest emotional expression.
in real life, i feel like i have to be the former, all black clothes and leather jackets. i am a transgender woman, i wasn't taught how to do makeup, and since my immune system is still very bad, Covid still isn't over, and i still have to wear a mask, trying to put on makeup outside of private occasions with friends and loved ones feels like a joke.
in this silly little video game, that i initially dismissed as a dusty brown and gray post-apocalyptic shooter when it was first revealed, i could be a vibrant pink space knight.
i've tried tons of different looks, taken breaks, tried different builds and classes and subclasses, but i kept coming back to the vibrant pink space knight, the wall against which evil breaks.
it was nice to feel like a feminine paladin when the world made me feel like i have to skew towards performing dark knight aesthetics and attitudes just to stay alive.
It's a dichotomy I think about a lot; I was raised Catholic, I read about knights and heroes in so many fantasy stories growing up. I played Final Fantasy 4 at a formative age, and even if Cecil Harvey had an effeminate design he was still very much a man. The duel of Dark Knight vs Paladin on Mt. Ordeal felt like such a good metaphor for life- are you going to hurt yourself to perform what other people want from you, or are you going to be who you really are and forgive yourself for your past misdeeds?
Pink, feminine things were very much forbidden for me as I grew older, classic "father wants you to be a man's man" type deal. I tried being feminine early in transition, and it didn't pan out. I have been ghosted, assaulted, abandoned, insulted, and just generally made to feel lonesome and hurt. i made lots of mistakes and hurt friends trying to find out who i was, and running away to avoid causing pain turns out to just cause different types of pain.
Synthesizing all of these contradictory feelings and trying to become the type of hero I always wanted to help me, even in a normal everyday life, is important to me. Living up to a personal code that involves caring for other people and standing up to those that would do harm is important to me. maybe i'm more don quixote than arthur, maybe i'm trying too hard to be something i'm not. maybe i'm too hard on myself for my mistakes, like friends keep telling me.
in the words of a certain paladin npc from Destiny 2, i'm still trying