Noah/Mirage - Tumblr Posts
If Noah/Mirage has a million shippers, I’m one of ‘em
If Noah/Mirage has one shipper, it’s me
If Noah/Mirage has no shippers, I’m fucking dead
Elena: Cool exosuit, Noah, what’s it made out of?
Noah: Oh, actually it’s-
Mirage: It’s Boyfriend Material
Trans Man Noah Diaz
The first time I saw Rise of the Beasts, I read Noah as a Trans Man, and that headcanon just solidified after my second viewing.
I’ll get the heavy reasons out of the way first, and work down to the most silly ones.
The section that was here before has been removed, because I was overstepping and someone rightly called me out on it. However. I’m not going to lie and pretend I didn’t do what I did. I deleted the comment that called me out because it made me feel bad, I panicked, and deleted it to save my own ego. It was wrong, it was cowardly, it was fucked up, and I shouldn’t have done it.
I truly am sorry, and have spent the last day sitting with myself until I stopped trying to excuse my behavior and just acknowledged what I did. I am not asking for forgiveness, I can only try going forward to be the kind of person deserving of it.
For now, I’m taking a break from this blog, leaving it on a queue, and I won’t be posting here for a while. Even though that isn’t the kind of person I want to be, I need to reckon with the fact that that is the kind of person I am. I’m sorry, once again.
1994 was also the year Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was put into place, which, for those too young to remember, was basically a policy allowing queer and trans people to serve in the military so long as they remained closeted, and prohibited superiors from forcibly outing them. Given that we’re never actually told in the film why Noah was discharged, it’s not unreasonable to think that it may have been because he got found out as trans.
The part that’s particularly personal for me is his relationship with Kris. I’ve also got a little brother that’s quite a bit younger than me, and I acted as an extra parent to him, practically raised him since we were both latchkey kids, and yeah, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’d face the apocalypse head on if it meant keeping him safe. All that to say, it’s comforting to think that Noah’s identity as a man is inseparable from his identity as a Big Brother, the way it is for me.
Most of my other reasons are less serious:
Noah wears a lot of layers and baggy clothes on his upper half, which yes, was part of 90s fashion, but it’s also how I dressed for most of my life, even before I realized I was trans.
Noah is also non-toxically masculine in a way that’s not unheard of but also not as common for men, especially service members, of that time period. Again, there may very well be a cultural component I’m missing here, let me know if there is, but this is just something I related to as a Guy Who Wasn’t Raised As One.
This last one’s kinda silly, but I’m a Car Guy, and one of the most gender euphoria inducing things I can do is work on my car. There’s few things that make me feel like Man quite like sweat on my brow and grease on my hands and a purring engine from a job well done. So for Noah to not only be a tech wiz but specifically a Mechanic? That was the thing that really sold me on this headcanon. (And that’s not even getting into the very fun implications of Noah being the one to repair Mirage, to get to know him so intimately, literally inside and out. Very nice.)
(I also love the idea that rather than being weirded out or taken aback at first like he is in some fics, Noah would be kinda weirdly affirmed to find out that not only does Mirage have some of roughly the same *equipment* while still being treated as and being a Mech, but his setup is the norm for Cybertronians. I can so picture Noah anxiously telling Mirage about his situation when they finally get together only for Mirage to be like “you mean other human mechs don’t have a 🐈??? Like, most humans only have one or the other?????”)