Neko

As a caveat, I want to avoid the implication that Godot is uniquely misogynistic – misogyny is a problem with the writing of the series as a whole, and athena-the-undestructible on Tumblr has talked about this here. My discussion of Godot’s performance of gender is about other traits stereotyped as ‘masculine’.

Godot’s previous life was marked by a hyper-performance of her assigned gender. Many pre-realisation or closeted trans people will overperform the societal role of their assigned gender as a defense mechanism, whether consciously or subconsciously. What we see of Godot before transitioning (i.e., before the coma) leaned into this, taking on an assertive and protective role, alongside coming across as stoic and assertive. She was aware of everything it supposedly meant to be a man, but not why every version of it felt ill-fitting.

In her view, Godot awoke from her coma as if she had risen from the dead. After five years, the world had moved on, and the woman she’d loved was dead. There wasn't anyone waiting for me when I woke up [3-5]. She feels as if she has no choice but to become an entirely new person, because she lives in a new world: one with a different body, and one with a different purpose.

Godot’s repeated references to herself as having died are important as a way of understanding how she views her chronic illness, and the person she was when Mia was alive (e.g., I've returned from the depths of Hell… To do battle with you [3-2]; I've experienced something most have not. Death [3-5]). But it is also easy to read this as a trans narrative: reclaiming the idea often touted by transphobes that transition is equivalent to death, or killing your pre-transition self.

She has the chance she never thought she’d get. With a life where she can choose what she becomes, cut free from the responsibilities of who she was before, she can make the decision she always viewed as an impossibility. She can take back the idea that she died, that transness is like murder, and find pride in it. Shed the person that she was before, and become Godot, a name that symbolises the feeling of constantly waiting that she once bore.

Alongside this, interpreting Godot as choosing to transition in tandem with recovering from her coma provides an avenue to explore the interplay between disability and transness. Medical transition often feels miraculous; treatments or quality-of-life improvements for some health conditions may feel the same way. However, a key component of why I think about this a lot for Godot is the other side of this: the pathologisation and over-medicalisation of the disabled/trans body.

Physical disability is dehumanised, the wants and experiences of a person seen as separate from the body they live in. The sick person’s life of being defined by your medical history, the mood of the doctor in charge of today’s appointment, medications and mobility aids and treatment plans, before anything else about oneself.

There are parallels between this and how the trans body is treated. As a wrongness; medical transition viewed as a treatment for this, but simultaneously not something that could ever be a necessity; as the thing that defines transness under cisnormativity; the addition of how transmisogyny demonises transfeminine bodies in particular.

At first glance, Godot’s statements about her body can seem contradictory, praising the medicine she relies on whilst describing it as tedious [3-5]. But they align with how the disabled/trans body is treated, and how it can feel to inhabit the intersection of these perceptions. A body that seems to fight against you, and everybody else seems to view the same way; but one that you have fought for, made your own.

As an example, Godot’s visor: she calls it ugly, before stating that she can’t see without it [3-5]. Physical disability aids are often perceived as obtrusive; visibly trans people are treated as unsightly. But both are about the ability to live – to do as much as you can for yourself. Godot struggles with the reality of becoming sick while remembering how she was before, the identity she used to inhabit, Mia’s death. But the culmination of her arc to me is about acceptance without diminishing difficulty, and that resonates for transness and disability.

Godot exists in a medicalised body, but that body is hers. She died, but she chose to be reborn.