Actually, no, I've been thinking about it and after talking with my brother I wanna send in a mix of a fanon complaint and a disability post
All those people I've seen in the Borderlands fandom whenever I look up stuff for Gaige are like "oooh it'd be so nice to have her as a girlfriend! She'd fix up mechanical things and you could leave hickies on her neck!" all this "uwu STEM gf" bs
Like do y'all realize she literally watched a classmate BLOW UP in front of her?? Do yall realize she got chased by a corrupt police system and fell into a war at only 18yo?? Not to mention if you follow the lore through Borderlands 3 she is THE Vault Hunter who canonically kills Handsome Jack. That girl is a ball of trauma!
Which actually reminded me just how mentally fucked up I was as Gaige. Like it was bad enough I had AuDHD and dyslexia (including dyscalculia), and bipolar and bpd and anxiety as a kid, but I was also transfem, which is what caused Marcie to start to hate me for... some reason. Idk what was going on in her head.
I hate ice, so crash landing on the shelf added some kinda trauma, plus Roland decided making me, the youngest and smallest Vault Hunter, go find the Firehawk. That was fun /s. Lil tore him an absolute new hole for that one.
But at some point we figured out I also age regressed as young as like, 3? I don't know if we ever figured out the cause of that or even what triggered that. Sometimes I'd just be yelling about Marcie or something else traumatizing and then somehow through the rant I just started becoming less and less eloquent until it clicked for Lil that I was mentally smol and she stepped in to take care of me.
I wish this world cared about trauma results as much as Pandora did. No one on Pandora ever questioned that the things that had happened to me had severely damaged me in ways that may not have even been reparable. But they understood that it affected how I continued existing. They didn't shoot us weird looks if I had a meltdown and Lil had to physically try to hold me down. Even if it resulted in a somewhat comical, in hindsight, scene of her being dragged across the floor for a few feet.
Hell, they were even far more accepting of gender identity and personal interests. I said I was a girl, and they just rolled with it. Didn't matter that I was a scrawny flat-chested 5'3" kid who'd physically crawl inside runners and technicals to fix them. "Gaige says she's a girl, so she's a girl." Never a question of "but you like engineering" or "well what's in your pants". Those who I was close to got told that Eden-5 had exceptional medical care (at least in our canon) and that I was completely physically transitioned (and because of that care, able to carry my own kids). Otherwise? People just thought I was a cis girl who liked robots and computers. No one cared. I miss that place sometimes. Sure the bandits were annoying, but at least I didn't have people giving me the fifteenth degree just for existing
- it's that same Gaige kinnie who sent a message about cutting off her arm lol
