(no subject)

Jun 24, 2009 00:19

I want Queer roleplaying - and I don't know how to get it.

I'm getting back into roleplaying games and storygames, but I've changed sex and started paying attention to the society that I live in. And this is causing some alienation.

Like other media, most roleplaying games, especially the big brands, tacitly endorse status quo ways of thinking and problem-solving. There might be spaceships or dragons, but these are often not more than mad libs for an underlying adventure story that's a cross between the (feudal) heroic narrative and a kind of "character building" that resembles a (socially oblivous) business growth strategy - there's an evil enemy, and you plan and whack it and take it's stuff, and are honoured far and wide, and next time, you're that much stronger.

It's a shame for a medium that champions imagination.

I still have a hunger for stories about the fantastic, but I also want something that speaks to the more socially conscious world I inhabit. I don't even care if the characters are well-doing people, I just want a fictional world that acknowledges the existance of power dynamics: how they form, how they work, and how they change. When power dynamics are acknowledged, the game is richer. The characters's world becomes more than a Mario Brothers level. Sometimes the players can even bring their stories in, and you can learn something.

I've also noticed that my favourite and richest characters are the Queer ones. But they're also the ones that I self-censor.

- Come to think of it, under "Queer characters," I should include female characters I played in tabletop (i.e. voice only - no movement or costume) before transition. Many gaming groups apply a mild stigma to cross-playing, at least for lads -

The self-censorship often stems from playing in gaming circles which are partialyl or mostly composed of people I've not seen much since before The Big Switch. It's awkward in its own right, as I'm trying to impress my change in identity on people I've not seen in awhile (a difficult task for a butch trans woman), let alone that of my character. It's also sticky because those games are decidedly tilted towards those who date heterogendered (whatever their orientations), and the stories generally reflect this. But it's also hard to avoid as I'm playing in larps now, whre I once played tabletop, and if cross-gender is "odd" in tabletop, it's almost unheard of in larp (except in the 7th Sea game, at least for women playing as men).

So my last few larp characters have been some shade of gender-odd. And it's silly to think that being gender-odd wouldn't havily afffect a character's outlook. But how do I work it into the game?

Characters:
First, in 2004, years before transition, was Aleksein. His female-only werewolf tribe (kinda based on Mary Daly's Gyn-Ecology) expected to grow up into a wise womyn... er wise werewomyn, but who felt that he'd rather live life as a human male psychiatrist and then went and did exactly that. Transition is a pain in the ass when you regenerate from any non-silver injury and have to make your own testosterone in a post-apocalyptic rainforest while being seen as a traitor to your tribe, but Aleksein went and did exactly that. He was the most grimly determined and un-intimidatable character I have ever played, and also the most gentle.

Aleksein Libushé probably came closest to actually being playable as intended (perhaps because one of the narrators was raised by a dyke couple?), as he was seen as a useless freak in the context of the game - more due to his pacifism, anarchism and partial mobility disability in a pack of warriors, than due to his gender, but it worked.

There was Rene "Lichen" Dubois, the Life Mage healer and shapeshifter. I played him just as I was just starting changing sex. Eventually he quit hanging out with mages, and is presumably still a shapeshifting healer now (post-transition) but nonchalantly as a different sex. What happens with Lichen remains to be seen, when he/she (as a shapeshifter, Lichen has no subconscious body-identity) shows up in game after two and a half years.

June "Ghost" Vandermejer was a petty criminal Butch abducted by faeries and taken forward in time from pre-Stonewall Boston. Her struggle was settling down to a quiet life as a mechanic, only to realize that she couldn't contextualize herself without having to worry about things like on-the-job discrimination, inescapable poverty, harassment, drug addiction, and police brutality. As much as she might like the idea of life without these things, with all the pressure suddenly taken off, she'd unravel like a body in a vacuum. But while the game was set in the present world, most of it took place in a magical Faerie otherland, where June's identity had no context and she became nothing more than a list of abilites on a sheet of paper.

"Kat" Song (the only non-larp character on this list) was a genderqueer extreme-body-perforance artist's consultant and host to an alien parasite... er... I mean 'symbiote.' This was sort of a metaphor for transitioning to a non-conventional gender, save that I stripped a lot out out of her character for the sake of playing with the old gaming buddies. Some of the old gaming buddies kept calling Kat "he" while in character, rather than "she" as I and two other players did - most likely because they were still adjusting to my change in pronouns. I suggested that we could work this into the story because their characters were genuinely mistaking Kat's gender (to which I alluded but was never explicit), which could come up when they had to live together in game, but I never got a response.

Speaking of real-world context, the thing that all four characters have in common is quitting the scene to go have a life. Aleksein grew tired of the disrespect and moved in with a pack in a fortified hospital. June just didn't see why she'd want to hang around with other (often targeted) Changelings when she could go be the bigger fish in a sea of more tolerant humans. Lichen decided that being a full-time mage was keeping him/her from his/her friends, hobbies and business. And in the last session of the campaign, Kat gave the ultimatum that while she might be the group's muscle, she was going to quit if people kept trying to kill her.

Now I'm playing in one larp pattered after adventure/romance/swashbuckling stories set in a magical and fictional 17th-century Europe.

It actually has in-world sexism as a challenge and I like it. As a giant tomboy in a family with four sisters and one brother, Rut Grobbek grew up earmarked as a spinster/caregiver. A sudden marriage of love and opportunity looked like a rescue, but turned out to be a scam, so Rut took to the sea "seeking vengeance" (or just getting away from home) dressed in pants, and passing as a teenage boy. Eventually her cover was blown and she was marooned in an Italian port where she was ostracized as a Dane and a pervert.

Rut's fun to play as a reckless and ruthless entrepreneur and closet heretic near the bottom of the game's ladder of social class. It's also fun to play a Queer character from a very different social context. Rut has never been exposed to any kind of modern gender theory, and she's never heard the term "sexual orientation." All she knows is that she prefers hanging out with the guys and all her attempts to connect with other "women in disguise" ended awkwardly when "she" turned out to be an adolescant male who thought she was a john.

The 7th Sea game has at least one woman playing a man, and this is not only awesome, but it helps Rut's story as it facilitates other player-characters making different assumptions around Rut's gender.

What a pleasant surprise!

rpg, queer

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