I'm the real girl boss

When you're growing up raised to be a man, one of the things you're repeatedly told is to be strong. That your strength is the most powerful thing in the world. You're told that the other side is weak and that if you become weak enough, you enter the other side.

You're told not to emote. Because emotions are weakness. And that the other side is overly emotional. That they're weak for that. And that you don't want to be weak either.

Trans women are people who are perceived to have given up that strength to join the weaker side. If they want to be taken seriously, they have to become as weak and fragile as possible. They can't be assertive.

Noelle Holiday is probably one of the most repressed characters in fiction. She desperately wants to be strong on her own terms. Her high school crush is a woman who's not scared to be strong, but chooses to act for herself and not for others. Noelle desperately wants to make her own choices, but there's society tells her she either needs to be maximally strong and be unhappy with her identity or be maximally weak in order to fade away into the darkness, where she cannot be perceived.

She tries very hard not to show any emotion other than a plastered smile on her face. Her big moment in Chapter 2 is feeling like she can voice her own opinions, that she can make her own choices. How fitting is it then, that she be transfem? Any transfems reading this, feel empowered. You can make your own choices.

And there is no need, no pull, to become "stronger" in a violent, anti-emotional sense. Masculinity as it exists is a cage built to trap women. Noelle tries her best to escape that cage but all she can do is slink off into a dark corner, where she isn't perceived.

Noelle coming out of that corner means she also breaks out of that cage, at least a little bit. Make your own choices, be your own person. Queen says as much. She tells Noelle to make the choice that makes her happiest.

Alright, we're now gonna talk about the weird route.

The weird route is an examination of power and control. You, as the player, order Noelle to do what you want, under the guise of becoming "stronger." You repeatedly tell her she's going to get "stronger". This is a different kind of strength than the one in the normal route, where she learns to stand up for herself. Sure, this strength can be used to do that, but this strength represents a lack of control.

You're forcing Noelle to come out into the center of the cage and roar like a lion. To put on a show. "You can't break out of this cage," you say, "but you can lean into the cage. Become the cage." That strength, the ideals pushed by masculinity - violence, aggression, repression of pain - that strength represents the lack of agency Noelle has. Yeah, the weird route is you repeatedly telling a transfem that she will never be a real woman, and to lean into her "male" privilege.

Noelle tries her best to slink into a corner of the cage where she isn't seen and isn't heard. She really only has one friend - other people still like her, probably because in Hometown the power of that cage is weakened, but at some point she had more friends and she's become isolated from them. I'm sure some of that is from family trauma, but big events like that can spur personal changes in ones' life.

Honestly for a while the antlers thing felt like it made sense. Now that we know Carol and Dess have antlers it's more likely they're just reindeer and naturally have antlers regardless of sexual dimorphism. The physical appearance of a transfem character matters very little to me now. It's part of the reason I hold transfem Ralsei as equally likely as say transfem Tenna. Similar arcs about lack of agency and control.

Ok, we gotta talk about her family. Rudy is a pretty standard silly-dad type. He reminds me of my own father in that way. Accepting of trans people. Similar to Toriel and Asgore in that way. I'm sure they at least think the way they treat Noelle is helpful to her. They have a trans child themselves (the latter two) so they get it. Rudy seems to be quite caring as well (and it seems that gender norms are less important to monsters in general.)

Carol... she's the one telling Noelle to stay in the shadows of that cage. She tells Noelle she can be a girl, but she only kind of believes it. She wants Noelle to sit in that corner, not perceived, because she believes that's the only way anyone could ever like her.

Do you all remember back in 2021, when everyone had Berdly transfem headcanons? Noelle and Berdly are quite similar. They're both expected to be and so things they aren't and don't want to do. Berdly is, by the way, Noelle's only real friend. Pretty accurate to real life, I'd say.

Well, ok, honestly, I know it's a meme or a stereotype at this point, but the venn diagram of nerdy hobbies and transfems are pretty overlapping. I think it's mostly because they're one of the few things considered typically "masculine" that exists as a side effect of the patriarchy and not to serve its purpose. Nerd culture therefore becomes something transfems can safely take with them into transition; of course, the large volume of men in it has leaked some misogyny into it. I think Berdly is a (kind of misguided, maybe?) criticism of this side of nerd culture - but generally, the hobbies themselves aren't very strongly gendered and therefore they appealed to Noelle before her transition as a neutral-to-feminine activity. That's why there's so many transfems into computers, games, and cartoons. It's because they're a largely neutral hobby that's been co-opted by masculinity - because of masculinity forced upon transfems, these activities are made more easily available to them, and their generic neutrality outside of the culture means that transfems don't feel a need to leave those hobbies behind. I don't actually believe any hobbies are strongly gendered but sports for example are a hobby that strongly enforces patriarchal ideals, even if sometimes not intentional.

I mean, ok, also, plenty of women within Deltarune (and Undertale!) enjoy nerdy stuff, and unless they're all transfem, it means that nerd culture is generally more neutrally viewed within monster culture. Still, the existence of Berdly does indicate that misogyny has in fact infiltrated nerdiness as to lower the exposure to anyone perceived as female for long enough, unless they've already been exposed before they were perceived as such.

ok i will also say noelle clearly has violent urges that she is repressing and that these feelings pretty clearly indicate a lack of choice or agency in her life and the weird route provides a channel for her to express these feelings but even then theyre not her choice

The gender binary throws you into two categories: those who kill and those who be killed.

Carol, trying to protect Noelle, throws her into the corner of the gladiator cage where she can be killed,

The player, weaponizing her lack of agency, throws her in the center, where she becomes the gladiator in the cage, the one who kills.

Noelle doesn't want to kill anyone. She doesn't want to be in this gladiator cage at all.