And she wasn’t the only avatar of illness, either: Throughout the decks of the Normandy, Mass Effect’s main spacecraft and home base across all three games, I saw reflections of myself. Tali was no longer simply an awkward and adorable ally, but a representation of my immunological disorder that I had never seen before. And so, when I started playing the Mass Effect: Legendary Edition remaster earlier this spring, I noticed the game in a brand-new way too.
I am, quite literally, a different person. Over a decade later, though, things have changed. Back then, I didn’t think twice about the Quarian engineer in the purple bio-suit, immunocompromised from a lifetime adrift in the stars, making her way through a galaxy teeming with alien bacteria and openly antagonistic to her continued health. I had not yet started taking pills to quiet my own immune system when Tali'Zorah nar Rayya first graced my screen. I had not yet received my double lung transplant when I first played Mass Effect, BioWare’s sprawling space opera shooter, in 2007.
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