akpaley

[akpaley]

Alright I keep commenting in tags on my reblog blog about how fun it is to see whether characters function the same if you genderswap them so for my entertainment I'm doing a rundown of all my characters who are still important to me and figuring out if and why they do or don't function if you just made them the other gender.

In general I do think this is more fun as analysis to do of books and movies and stories that are constructed as a whole and not week to week by people who don't communicate about themes. The thing I've done here is just not as fun literary analysis. But I liked doing it anyway.

I guess starting recent and going backwards chronologically.

Kaijja: Does not function nearly as well as a man for like a bunch of reasons. For one, in her culture being a woman is a position of privilege, and it MATTERS that Kaijja is privileged in just about every way known to man while believing religiously in her fiercely egalitarian semi-anarchist culture. The contradiction is part of the point. Additionally, the contradiction of having capitalized really hard on the imagery of pregnancy and then using that imagery to assume a role that resulted in her being an extremely absent actual parent is an important contradiction for her, especially because she still has all her culture's beliefs about pregnancy and motherhood. As a sub-point to that, absent father who prioritizes his career gets to be a sympathetic role often, whereas women tend to get portrayed much more negatively for that behavior. I think being a warm loving decent person who cares really deeply about their work and has messy feelings about being an absent parent is just a more interesting thing to put on a woman than on a man when you live in the culture I live in. But that's not really as important as the other ones.

Hassan: There are a bunch of asterisks above this one, but all I'm going to say is that the concept of Hassan is deeply entrenched in a set of gender roles that were common in the fantasy I grew up reading. You could gender swap this character and the narrative would still work and the character would still work, but it would very likely read very differently to an audience because of how entrenched that character is in fantasy gender roles. Maybe that's an argument that it should be done. It is worth noting that I have thought a lot more about that character's relationship to gender on the second go around than I did on the first one, and I think that character is going to end up... A lot less functionally trans as a result of both that and their narrative knives being sharper. But I think all that thinking would function more or less the same if you gender swapped them, just flipped. Ask me more about this in like six months or whenever it's come up in that game.

Angel / Flightrisk / permanently unnamed dark urge: Could be gender swapped easily but I would not enjoy it. 90% of the time I will play a woman in video games given the option. That does not make it narratively important.

Jinan: uhhhh cannot genderswap. Giving them a gender fundamentally changes them as a character. Even if you gender swapped them to the third gender adopting gender would fundamentally change their character. It probably wouldn't fuck with the overall narrative, but it simply would not be the same character anymore.

Eldris: The narrative would change absolutely none if you made this guy a woman. My personal as a real human development would be slightly different if he had been though. Eldris was part one of my run at trying to embody a kind of care and safety and groundedness that I associated pretty specifically with masculinity at the time. Beginning of campaign Kaijja was part two of this where I was like "why IS this masculine to me, I can put this in a woman" but uh. Then the plot happened so that's much less part of Kaijja nowadays. It's still there a little bit but more as flavor text, Kaijja is running a very different set of themes at this point.

Carrie: Carrie could be a boy just fine! It would change almost nothing! Ask me about this in five years or whenever we're two campaigns down the road.

Aria: Could easily be a man no problem. Like two plot points would have been impacted by this and neither is a big deal.

Xey: Could be a man but it feels weird dude. It would create minor mechanical and narrative changes but not major ones. This is much more of a "I have had this character for longer than I have had a solid separation between character and player" problem. I will say if I were writing them clean now I think the Sparks side of that character could easily be either cis because they don't care or agender because they don't care. But I don't think any version of this character functions differently for being a man or a woman if one was writing them clean and not as someone kind of inextricably linked to me.

In conclusion: As is maybe evident, I have become much much more interested in gender roles as an adult, not because I like them but because I think the ways and reasons societies construct and enforce them are very interesting. I am much more likely nowadays to write a character and think very actively about their relationship to gender and sexuality than I was as a teenager or a kid.

That being said, I think if I were to run a game nowadays I would probably want to take the "write NPCs and then assign them gender randomly afterward and figure out how that flavors the stuff I already know about them" strategy. I think it helps counteract implicit bias and internal tropes. (I could say many words about gender tropes in my first campaign. Or like. The fact that Carrie kind of is a girl gender trope I have in my head regardless of whether it exists outside my head. The Carrie-type character will get auto assigned girl if I don't make choices otherwise. Flightrisk probably would not have been played the way she was if she was a dude, she is. Fairly Carrie-type adjacent. Fane is not listed here because I didn't make the gender choices about him, but that guy is both completely gender flippable and also reeeeally masculine vibing in my head. I think trying to be more intentional about that kind of internal trope stuff would be healthy for me.)

[akpaley]

This body is built on the ruins of all the people I have ever been Wise men build their houses on rocks While the rest of us settle for skeletons

[akpaley]

<3

Recent af attacks I’m proud enough to post!

Credits (in order) under cut:

Kaijja by @akpaley

Deiji by @awesomefella2001

Rakhmina by @zavtrakturista

Melinoe by @jaywalkingermine on tumblr and af (not letting me tag 4 some reason 💔)

Sadiq by @kidhellion

[akpaley]

That Which Remains for @pebblefriend on Artfight!

This is kind of messy but I had a lot of fun putting it together.

[akpaley]

Oh damn, I forgot to link the zine I drew these for when it came out!

The Voice of the Heavens and Other Stories is a zine by my long time friend Niall Sulcer featuring six short stories. If you're interested in fairy tales with themes of queerness and environmentalism among others, give these a read, they're quite beautiful.

Proceeds go to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.

A pair of pieces I did for a friend's zine.

[akpaley]

Saorirse for Ghost_artfight on Artfight!

And then here are just the lines because I liked just the lines.

[akpaley]

Tiffany for @mintleafsillyz on Artfight!

This was a super fun sketch to do, and then it was also fun to come home and sit down and figure out how to paint it.

Raw sketches that went into this (it got flipped in the painting process)

[akpaley]

Quick little artfight doodle for @artsycrapfromsai who I have been watching draw very cute things for years. I had a silly idea about your characters, hope that's cool.

[akpaley]

Aioli for Carpaline on Artfight!

Experimenting in throwing a bunch of my textured brushes at the canvas and seeing how it felt to build form.

[akpaley]

I'm now technically on Art Fight. Here I am. Just in time to fall off the face of the earth for a week.

Planning to keep it chill and low pressure, but hopefully it'll be fun and I can find some fun guys to draw.

Should I do art fight? It seems fun but it's also very intimidating.

[akpaley]

I think this is looking kind of nice. IDK how finished it's gonna get, but I think I want to at least get an impression of the full composition before I stop working on it.

[akpaley]

An experiment and a sketch I liked.

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Doodles of our DOS2 guys. I think the drawing in the middle top is still probably the most correct vibing alive Fane I've drawn.

[akpaley]

Our DOS2 guys, past and present :)

[akpaley]

Your maw agape I do not flee For peerless beauty this is he

[akpaley]

Subtitled I wonder how yonic can I make my body horror

[akpaley]

Aceta, Dextro's wizard mentor who routinely betrays everyone she works for, possibly including us.