#and the way society emotionally isolates men and discourages them from/punishes them for having emotionally intimate friendships with other

[smallandalmosthonest]

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[yelloskello]

just wrote a ridiculously long post musing on the influence of media on my roleplaying decisions and then realized it was a fuckin novel and now i’m just gonna... delete it all and start over

basically, like. There’s a noticeable trend in roleplaying circles for most folks to play mostly if not entirely dudes - not all obviously, but a significant enough chunk to make that statement. I remember there being a thread on the forums I frequent where someone asked about it and asked for the reasoning behind people choosing to play one gender over the other, and the vast majority response from roleplayers of any gender was playing guys for one reason or another, ranging from ‘idk I just prefer them’ to ‘i never really thought of women as being able to be cool or flawed or interesting’. Which makes sense, considering we live in a society where so so so so so many female characters in popular media are written as either Nagging Only Sane People There To Bring The Wacky Guys Back Down, or Bland Pretty Things with the personality of a turnip.

and like. i’m wondering why I ended up going the completely opposite direction, where 80% of my characters are women, and it wasn’t a recent development that grew with my feminism, either - i’ve preferred making lady characters for as long as i’ve been able to pick up a pencil, and what dudes I make tend to lean towards being effeminate, emotionally open, and gentle. (And when they’re not, they tend to be pretty explicitly gay/bi/pan. A couple of my most masculine characters are the ones who are in ride-or-die relationships with my best friend’s dude characters.)

Basically the tl;dr of the thoughts came out to:

A: A HUGE chunk of the media I was taking in before even the age of 10 featured women as protagonists without ever presenting it as a Woman Story About Being Womanly, at least as far as I remember. Gender was just treated as a neutral playing field, never mentioned but with equal distribution throughout the stories, and I partook in a lot of stuff that showed the story from a woman’s perspective. A lot of this media I was introduced to by my sister, who, as long as I can remember, has been GNC and interested in GNC things. I ALSO partook in kinda fringe stuff like small-time webcomics that had lady protagonists who acted straight up goofy and were never remotely sexualized, and at least one of those things was MASSIVELY formative for me, to the point where the first comic I ever drew at the age of 8 was basically just like... A blatant ripoff of that comic. Like. That comic was the reason I got into my lifelong passion of comics.

B: By some fucking miracle, while gender did have an influence on my upbringing, it wasn’t... Super significant. Gender roles were not heaped heavily upon me by my parents (which is kinda shocking, considering they’re like, die hard conservative christians), and when they did Heap it, it was easy enough to just kinda... Ignore it.* I was never chided for doing things that weren’t Stereotypically Feminine: wearing clothes “for boys”, having a majority of friends who were boys, doing activities that one would think of in a gendered sense as ‘boy stuff’, actively rejecting the societal expectation to get married and have kids, etc. 

Honestly, I think a lot of this was basically just dumb luck, though: I was still feminine enough that my mom wasn’t alarmed when I started wearing clothes intended for boys. My adamant refusal of marriage/children was and IS STILL responded to with a smile and a joke and obviously thinking i’ll change my mind one day. I’ve always kept my hair VERY short, and was even encouraged to by my mom, but the styles I wear are still some degree of feminine - pixie cuts and shit - and the reason she’s encouraging is because SHE wore her hair short growing up and just thinks it’s cute. By the time I started branching into mohawks and undercuts, my mom was getting to a point where she was more concerned with having a good relationship with her kids and being positive no matter what than whether or not I didn’t look straight. (I can always tell that she doesn’t particularly like it, but is trying to be supportive when I show up with a ‘weird’ haircut.)

(my dad, on the other hand, made a stink when I wanted my first undercut, told me i’d ‘look like a d***’ and would ‘never get a boyfriend’. but he was kinda distant anyways due to his job and didn’t really have a lot of involvement or say over my choices growing up.) my point is, though, that gender may not have been entirely a neutral playing field growing up, but I was never taught/it never sunk in for me that women shouldn’t be rowdy or ‘boyish’ or loud or strive for greater things, and I wasn’t punished or discouraged for being that way myself. The combination of these two things basically meant that I was seeing women who got to act just like the Cool Boy Characters out there on the regular, didn’t really make a big deal about gender/gendered things, and the tendency for women to be bland or unlikeable in a lot of media just kinda went over my head.

...plus i’m sure there was some Big Gay buried in there somewhere where I’ve just always preferred the look of women so if I wanted to rip off some Funny Likeable Boy character from a tv show i’d do it n i’d make them a lady. They’re more interesting to look at and more fun to draw! what do you want from me

Also, looking back on the first point: I wonder if growing up with media like that is why I VASTLY prefer stories that just HAVE diversity that isn’t really the focus, versus Queer Stories or Nonbinary Stories or Women Stories or Mentally Ill Stories or so on and so forth. While I want to see someone like me out there fighting dragons n shit, while i’m like ‘holy shit this character is bi?? she’s MINE NOW’ in a story that’s mostly about trying to survive political intrigue and navigating a cutthroat court, I just feel Tired when there’s a story that’s clearly about navigating anxiety or dealing with sexism on the daily or somesuch. I get they’re meant to be relatable, but i’m like... I live that shit every day, I don’t want an extra dose of it here, too. I’d rather just see people like me getting to be the cool heroes we liked reading about growing up. I want my mental issues and my queerness and my gender, I just want DIVERSITY to be just as default as the Default Straight White Man Protagonist, to just be mundane, not a beacon of being Different with stories that cater to how Different I am, constantly reminding me that I am Different and that this story isn’t widely relatable and caters to a certain audience of Different People. There’s a fine line between ‘we’re all different and we need to understand there’s nothing wrong with that’, and ‘this makes me feel more distant and isolated from other groups than ever before’.

but that’s just my personal taste. Anyways.

wow this ended up being just as fricken long as my original post on this, good job me

(*except for like... this had a lot of different factors, but in my young to mid teens, I very much felt like i’d never land a boyfriend and that no guy could ever actually find me attractive. Some of this was due to an abusive friend who was isolating me while simultaneously reminding me about how important it was to be desirable to men; some of it was due to how much subtle anxiety my mom projected on me about behaviors I should upkeep so I would look desirable to men. ‘don’t put the elbows on the table so that you look proper when you’re out on a date!’ sorta crap. Some of it was due to being unaware of how FUCKEN BI I was (REAL BI, now that I look back on it) and brought up in a homophobic setting so it never occurred to me that there was more than just dudes. That anxiety was the closest I ever really came to feeling like I was failing at femininity, though.)