I'm making a miniature NES Metroid "remake", with a legally distinct OC. Her name is Relan Eire, which is a cool name I thought a lot about.

I've had a lot of thoughts about a Tragic Yuri Samus Aran who lives in a world where FTL travel is impossible. She travels from existential threat to another, spanning lightyears. She experiences spacetime in this visceral way. It's hard enough to date when you're socially stunted and raised by ancient birds. It's even harder when you have to travel 100 lightyears away to save the galaxy. By the time you come back, 200 years will have passed, and your girlfriend will be long dead.

Kind of like "Fry's Dog" if it were incredibly cool.

A recent spate of phobes on r/metroid makes me especially adamant about Relan being a trans lesbian. But in my headcanon, she doesn't even know she's trans. Here's why:

• For starters, we don't know if "trans" would be a relevant bit of gender vocabulary on some planet in space in the far future.

• She was three when her life was turned upside down, and doesn't know many other humans as a point of comparison. Femininization was just a byproduct of being infused with bird DNA, she never even thought about it.

Also, in my legally distinct universe, they're not chozo, they'd just evolved corvids. They're not bird people, they're bird birds.

Also, Relan uses she/he/they(plural)/it pronouns. Some think she's a robot guy, some think she's a bird, some think she's an urban legend, some think she's multiple people throughout galactic history attributed to one entity. Canonical multi-pronoun legend.