With that in mind, here's like ten paragraphs about trans stuff and Knights of the Old Republic II.
There are certain themes that resonate with me, vibrating deep parts of me that I can't quite reach. Stories about loneliness, about losing parts of yourself, about learning the wrong lesson. In the community, we call it "detransition" when you give up living your life as yourself and go back into hiding. If that sounds judgmental, it's just the echo of my own bitterness. Sorry.
Your character - the Exile - did something so terrible that she was cut off from the Force completely. She has to re-learn how to be a person from the ground up, severed from the heartbeat of life. I identified with that sense of having your inside torn out, with discovering that there's a hole in the world. I still do. When I detransitioned, my confidence left me. I felt guilt for trying to convince people I was a woman, then more for not having the guts to go through with it. More than that, though, was the feeling of going off of estrogen. It was like I'd had a star open up inside of me and then through my carelessness snuffed it out. My connection to the Force was stripped from me.
"I suffered ... indignities. And fell into darkness." -Kreia
RPGs, like the Joseph Campell fueled mythos of Star Wars, reiterate protean patricides, always finding a new Dark Father to kill. The theme of the RPG is growth - you overcome adversity and become stronger for it. The genre is about adolescence, so of course you fight your parents. I say "parents," but it's always the father, echoing the Oedipal. He tries to steal the pure maiden whom the mildly pubescent hero is in chaste love with, and for that he deserves to die. The father hoards mother-as-saint and must defeated in order for the son to become the father.
But Kreia. Oh, Kreia. Mother, teacher, protector, ideologue, adversary. Kreia's narrative weaves in themes of control, the pain of wanting something greater for your charge. She wants you to see her point of view, and is willing to help or hurt to achieve that goal. She genuinely loves you, and she can't help but hate it that you love people other than her. She hates being tied to the cyclical nature of a story - the curse of being bound by a narrative Force - and wants you to break free from it, live the life she could've had. And does evil for it.
I can't write about her without it being obvious that I love this character in a way I can't explain. I fear my mother, sometimes. Back before I detransitioned, she was pretty much opposed to me following my own path. In that soft way, where you find ways to undermine, but are no less obvious in intent. I don't trust her anymore, not in the way I did beforehand. Even beyond my own transubstantiation, I know of terrible things she's done, moral lapses that coexist in dissonance with the nice little lady that gives me soup in Tupperware.
The problem with KotOR II is that it is unplayable. It is mess that was never finished and all attempts to polish it have still left it with this empty spaces fan enthusiasm fails to fill. No amount of effort will cause it to be truly finished. So, I fear, with my body, the eternal battlefield. I can get asymptotically close to forgetting about the scars that mark my condition, but maybe it'll never be fixed. I write about it, and I feel guilty. Guilty! For talking about my life. As though it should go unspoken.
There is no conclusion. In the original, Kreia tells your future in a fit of prognosticating pique and then expires. They added some cruft back in with the restoration mods, but it's all still a bit of a mess. It's not clever enough to be a message. Sometimes you just run out of time.
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