Kobold Catgirl |
I dunno, I think playing a straight Valeros as a lesbian egg sounds kind of cute. That's a matter for fanfiction, though.
*annoying trans girl voice* okay, queer guys, let's fix this setting up for y'all. see, here, we'll just take this very bi-coded male fighter, give him some cute shirts, some stockings, and Bob's your--whoops. just egged her. my bad guys
TriOmegaZero |
Kobold Catgirl |
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I will say for the record that I do not see anything wrong with swapping a character's sexuality (or gender, even) for your own fiction or your own game. It might reveal some things about you--like that you're not comfortable roleplaying a gay guy, or that I like playing sapphic women as a universal constant--but I don't feel any need to play the game this guy's trying to lay out for us. The weird thing isn't playing Quinn as straight (although it might indicate limits in your role-playing comfort zones for all kinds of reasons), it's making a big deal about it for attention.
Here's the thing. We're talking about fanfiction here, and in fanfiction, you're always going to be making changes to the source material. So when you read a fanfic, the first thing you ask yourself is, "what changes were made, and why?"
So when I see a story or a game where somebody takes a character who's normally, canonically gay and decides to play them as straight, or vice versa, I ask myself why. I learn a lot from that. Why did you want to write, I don't know, Captain Kirk as a gay man? Well, probably because there aren't a lot of TV shows to connect to with gay spaceship captains. This one caught your eye, and you decided to make changes so you could tell a unique story with them.
But the former? Well, that's very ambiguous, isn't it? Maybe they just really like the chemistry between that character and a particular female character. Maybe they're clueless and didn't even notice the subtext, if the show wasn't super clear. Or maybe they hate gay people and want to pretend they don't exist. In all of these examples, the sad fact is that they are taking a rare example of gay representation and choosing to target it and make it straight. I don't think that makes it inherently Wrong, but it makes me ask a lot more questions about their motivations, and depending on their influence, I may hold them in considerable mistrust and disappointment. If you write a story about Turing and erase him being gay, or adapt Twelfth Night and carefully extract any gay implications from the text, and you have the power to make that the dominant reading, to erase important stories and opportunities for a heavily marginalized group? Well, you might do some damage. You should know better.
James Jacobs Creative Director |
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Val'bryn2 wrote:Reminding everyone that, per Paizo's policy, every single one of the characters they are complaining aren't queer enough are, canonically, bisexual?James specifically doesn't appreciate people using answers from his AMA thread as weapons in discussions, you know.
Very true, and that's one of the main reasons I stopped doing that AMA thread. It was causing me more stress than was worth it. The "all our iconics are bisexual unless otherwise noted" is a many-years-outdated comment from an era where we weren't including things like an iconic's sexuality in their stories, because early on we didn't realize that was as important as we later learned (they were originally mostly just PC stand-ins for art and then pre-gen characters intended to give folks a character to play if they didn't have one handy for an adventure).
That said, representation is incredibly important to me. I'm bisexual myself, and seeing bisexual representation is something I was eager to get into the game with Merisiel early on.
To get into a bit more detail about how iconics have developed over the decades: Over time, the role of our iconic characters has changed and adapted. At first intended only to be art guides for artists (so we don't have to explain what a rogue or wizard or cleric or whatever should or shouldn't wear or carry each time we illustrated a player-character stand-in in an illustration), folks were so intrigued by Wayne Reynold's amazing art and design that they started asking who those characters were. We answered by giving them names and backstories, but in the earlier days of Paizo (from which the above notion from my AMA comes), we were more timid about defining non-game-rule elements for the iconcis, such as their sexualities.
Today, in no small part due to encouragement and feedback from all of you, but also from our personal discoveries (such as my own with having Merisiel representing bisexuality in the game), it's become increasingly important for us to make sure our iconic characters do more than just show artists what a class looks like. They're representatives and ambassadors to the gaming world, and they're one of our most powerful ways to show rather than tell the world that gaming is for everyone.
That includes all sorts of inclusiveness, and is why in 2nd edition we're much less timid about getting into the iconics' sexualities and beliefes and ancestries and histories, because doing so makes Golarion a more diverse and welcoming world, and also gives a much wider range of characters to admire for all sorts of folks to see in the world who are like them.
Just like it's important to me to see Merisiel represent bisexuality.
We do need and want and intend to have more male queer representation in the game, but we only create a limited number of iconics a year and many of those have stories and personalities and sexualities that are already set, so it's not appropriate to change those things. It's also (as I've learned) not the best practice to reveal these things in messageboard posts, because that doesn't reach as far as a full-blown "meet the iconic" blog post or the like.
In the meantime, we'll continue to have representation across all facets of human diversity in our games, but you'll see the majority of that show up in the NPCs we create in our settings and adventures, since we create many more of them as opposed to iconics.
And again, I 100% agree we need more queer dudes in the game.
Jim Butler President |
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Happy 4th of July! I see the fireworks were fierce in here today.
I made some pretty deep cuts to this thread due to baiting. More posts were cut for replying to those messages. I'll leave it to Jon when he gets back to decide if I cut a bit too deep.
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Jonathan Morgantini Community and Social Media Specialist |