Hello, everyone!
I'm back from a long-ass chosting hiatus because I have been playing Paper Mario, and after doing the second chapter's Peach story, I have some Thoughts.
Everyone knows that famously the game has a canonically trans character, Vivian. The text in the remake is as clear as clear can be about this. I am now realizing, however, that there is indeed another trans character in the game! The computer who is trying to learn how to love, TEC.
I remembered this storyline very well, and although there's definitely some aspects of it that can feel uncomfortable with the way TEC speaks to and observes Peach, the scene in which TEC uses a hologram to be a dance partner for Peach felt very illuminating and different playing it now after learning so much about my own trans identity. Going through that process enabled me to see that TEC is in the beginning stages of coming to greater awareness of itself.
TEC sees Peach when she's brought to the X-Naut's lair, and is hit with a barrage of emotions that it struggles to identify, realizing that it's enamoured with Peach and wants to know more about her. It talks with her and Peach suspects that it has fallen in love with her. The moment where things got interesting for me is when TEC talks to Peach about dancing, and tries manifesting a hologram in order to be a dance partner for her. It manifests a hologram of Peach!
It felt like a lightning bolt hitting me, I realized that TEC was experiencing the all too common sensation of being infatuated with someone but also wanting to be them. After the dance is over, TEC wants to go back through its memories about it to understand the parts that felt fun for it, which really felt to me like the ways I first got to express myself as my gender and going through those moments and rethinking the euphoria I experienced in order to better internalize and understand who I am.
I love this game, and I'm really looking forward to seeing if there is more to this reading. Hopefully I can chost more about it!