rar.
THE RP SEXUALITY MEME, care of Lys who is a darling.
1) List your main pups. Or all of your pups. And potential pups. Whatever, have fun.
2) Take a look at the Kinsey scale.
3) List and explain an area on the scale for that given character, giving specific examples if you'd like, or multiple numbers based on your rationalizations.
4) Know your pup just a little better.
Martel: 0: Martel's formative years and significant parts of his adolescence and adulthood were spent as a devoutly religious man who went into a religious order; his social circle was pretty open-minded and progressive for the place and era, but societally he was raised with the concept that homosexuality is a sin. He's straight up heterosexual and has very little interest in other people's sexual proclivities beyond "do you mind not getting slut all over my nice boots, it just doesn't go with my vibe" (yes, he's an asshole, yes, he probably said something worse than that to Arissa) or "i know places where they burn you for that, you should maybe not be doing it in public".
His sexuality is much like the rest of him; he wants to be in control of it and he's obsessive about what he perceives as belonging to him (CANDICE I AM SO SORRY IN GENERAL). He's not generally fixated on sex inherently; Arissa killed his libido like a heat-seeking missile and I imagine between running around trying to fuck up Sparhawk's life and running around trying to make plans to fuck up Sparhawk's life, all the while being stuck with the aforementioned horrifying princess & her former-churchman ex-lover, he had neither time nor inclination to hook up.
Generally he's not the kind of man who is comfortable with casual sex and absolutely if you betray him in any way he will destroy you and everything that you love. And then be angry about it for twenty years. Just FYI. During the time where he was tooling around as a lone mercenary making himself The Scariest Ever, he didn't relax this so much as adapt it; he had basically cut off if not totally destroyed all personal connections he had and people need those, he made do with occasionally seducing women he would probably not give his real name and almost definitely never see again after maybe a week, tops.
He probably has bastards in Eosia! Enjoy that. (sob)
He doesn't feel threatened by...much of anything, frankly; one of Martel's big characteristics is "ego the size of the moon", he is arrogant and often he is not actually wrong to be so confident, but that's a whole other thing and you know he could stand to be less of a tool about it. Homosexuality doesn't bother him and doesn't concern him; if he were hit on by a man it'd depend on who and how as to how he reacted, and could be anywhere from 'no, thanks, not my thing' to '*knifes*'. The latter is less to do with sexuality, more to do with the fact sometimes Martel is inclined to kill people. Um. As an example (of Martel not killing anyone...hi), while in TRoM he firmly and repeatedly rejects any possibility of taking Emperor Sarabian to bed with himself and his wife, it's more or less the same way he continues to ignore Empress Elysoun, and he's amicable, even friendly with them, as they work together.
(COMPLETELY HETEROSEXUAL)
Donna (Poly): 2, 2.5: Significant parts of Donna's "issues" involve or relate to her sexuality, one way or the other. Hooray! That in mind:
Donna is basically bisexual, which is in fact how she identifies. She's had more relationships (sexual and/or emotional) with men than women for the following reasons: convenience, what she believes is expected of her, what she believes she can get out of them, and the fact she believes she values women more than men and generally speaking, they can and should do better than her. (A man looking at her and seeing a slut is Tuesday afternoon; a woman looking at her and seeing a slut is wrist-slittingly painful. Why yes, she does have mommy issues! How could you tell.)
She operates with a lot of internalized misogyny, at the same time as this; she's forced herself into an image that she believes is what people expect or want from her, and it is, in fact, significantly based on the perceived sexual preferences of men - often older than she is, inevitably considered by her to be "more intelligent". Donna uses sexuality like she uses anything else, to draw people to her and make them trust/want/need her when she doesn't trust them but needs somebody to validate her and tell her she's pretty and desirable. This is often mostly how she defines her self-worth, which she is aware is fucked up and unhealthy, but she hated therapy and after years of learning to adapt herself to whatever she thinks suits a situation, she's afraid there's nothing left under that and that if someone asked her to drop the act she would have nothing to give them.
She's at the same time deferential and defiant with men; she insists loudly and at length what she doesn't need and makes downright misandrist comments to prove she doesn't need them, not a little bit, not even at all...and then she has no idea what to do without one to bounce off.
She likes sex; she genuinely likes to be touched, be it for platonic or sexual reasons. She also likes the idea of being in control of an encounter - of someone else. Donna gets off on seducing men she perceives to be more intelligent and more powerful than she is, and if she can get them to keep coming back - even better.
Women are fascinating to her; she doesn't believe she has the same worth as most women she knows, but she wants to, and wants to impress them and please them. They're attractive and she can easily fall in love with them - the reason she doesn't as often 'go for it' is that for her sex has become so often a power trip or a contest (with herself, with the world), and she rejects applying that to other women. She doesn't want to treat them the same way and she doesn't know how else to relate sexually; she's pretty young, frankly, and she has time to learn and work through this stuff, but she might not ever.
(BISEXUAL...OPPORTUNISTIC)
Lourdes: 4: While it's a fair point that Lo's older alt is monogamous with a man, this is true of both of them. (Monty/Lo was a luck out, really; she defaults to women before men and Carla or one of the other Gotham girls before anyone.) Lo likes to be dominated by women, but will 95% of the time reject it (violently, enjoy that) from a man, who probably did not anticipate being topped by a tiny, pretty little thing covered in pink and glitter who doesn't care what his name is and thinks 'sweetie', 'baby' and 'honey' are suitable alternatives at all times, even if she's actually going to knife him later. Hooray! You'd think...everything about her ever would be at odds with her devoutly Catholic faith; and it ... kind of is, frankly, but Lo is batshit fucking insane and this is reflected in more or less everything she does. Whether it's immediately obvious or not.
Women are what Lo likes best; they're pretty and they're just better. They're who she wants to spend time with, have sex with, fall in love with. Men are usually a means to an end or a game of some kind; she finds them attractive, sure, but at the end of the day, he's just a man, isn't he? (Monty is the bewildering exception to this rule; they suit each other surprisingly well, but Lo herself had moments where she considered bolting back to Gotham and her girls, baby in her belly and all, before they went through with the wedding.)
TinyLo might actually even be 4.5-5.
(PREDOMINATELY HOMOSEXUAL, BUT MORE THAN INCIDENTALLY HETEROSEXUAL)
Enfys: 2.5: (would claim 0, maybe 0.5) Enfys is so far in the closet that she should just start fucking Mr Tumnus and be done with it; she's bisexual, which she's known if not wholly acknowledged (ever) since she was in her teens. She identifies ostensibly as straight; her flirtations with women have always carried an implied "I do anything for attention/I'm married so this is just friendly teasing". Both of which (until her separation & subsequent divorce, for the latter) were generally true, as far as they went; Enfys will do all sorts of things for a reaction, short of actually fucking another woman. She's a crazy, crazy little troll.
Enfys has had very few relationships of much significance in her life; her first boyfriend was followed swiftly by her second boyfriend, who has been it for most of her adult life; they married in their twenties and even after separating from him, Garion was a large point by which she defined herself. It took her six years (give or take) to finally decide that she had passed the point where she could have saved their marriage and divorce him, and like it or not she still feels for him pretty deeply. Sagramore was a partial catalyst for that; she's not in love with him (though she occasionally wishes she were/could be), but she couldn't continue involving herself with him in good conscience without facing up to how far her marriage had gone. I'm digressing!
Enfys wanted more boundaries than she properly got, as a teenager, which in those formative years...sort of...developed into a kink of sorts; Garion was the least interesting to Enfys when he let her win, and held her attention for so long partially because he'd fight with her and she didn't always win. He learned how to deal with her forcefully and it was...what she wanted. (Horrible fact: since Blake Angler was what they initially fought about the most, technically Garion kept her interest by ... being jealous of the guy she would've otherwise been involved with. What.) Enfys wants someone to, uh, take her in hand. Great! (Enfys has never been more intrigued by Sagramore than when he yells at her. I don't even know.)
She's never allowed herself to explore her sexuality any further than "I like men, it doesn't matter, stop trying to make me grow as a person and not be a nutcase". She was raised Irish Catholic, and though much of her throwing herself into the faith was based on spite (...yes, it's a long story) and bone-deep she is not, herself, actually a Catholic, a lot of things rubbed off. Like 'homosexuality is not okay'. She adopted these practises and beliefs for herself, and that was one of the things she took away - and as the latter half of her adolescence she had only her father (an Irish-Catholic ex-cop), who she takes after but had never really been primarily parented by to lean on...concern for how he'd see her if she admitted that outweighed honesty, which she (a habitual liar) doesn't really value properly anyway. John probably would've had an unfortunate initial reaction and calmed down; Enfys's relationship with her father deteriorated so much she never allowed herself or him the opportunity.
(PREDOMINATELY HETEROSEXUAL, MORE THAN INCIDENTALLY HOMOSEXUAL. LIVING IN NARNIA.)
Gates: 2.5, 3: Gates is the original version from whence came Enfys; she is younger than Enfys Eddings, but strangely better adjusted. At least in some respects! The lack of devotion to Catholicism and never having lost her mother mean that some (most) things which defined Enfys's making camp in Narnia were never issues for Gates at all. Gates is pretty close to being a down-the-middle 3, probably the only thing that nudges her towards a 2.5 is the fact that she's only had two relationships in her life and they were both with men. One of these was never "consummated" (as it were), but Gates wasn't sleeping with anyone else for his sake and was very interested in going there.
Gates's first relationship, first time, first most everything was Anders Blakely; she waited 'til marriage to lose her virginity. Less because she prized it herself and more because she was aware of the occult value of virginity and hung onto it just in case she could use it for something. She got married instead! Anders and Gates's marriage did not last as long as their relationship had; they separated about six months after the wedding. Sans-Anders, she explored her own sexuality about the same way she does everything else; enthusiastically and well-documented (in notebooks, you gutter-dwelling bastards). While still legally wed, she never really looked for anyone else to replace him emotionally, and mostly continued this for several years after his death.
Gates doesn't look at sex as a romantic thing or something sacred; it's fun and it makes her feel good and it's much easier than sustaining a relationship, which she's never been good at and rarely has desire to try for. Men and women pretty evenly attract her interest; mainly she needs/wants someone who can keep up with her and pull her back when she needs pulled back. What they've got in their pants does not concern her overmuch unless it's got spikes or something horrible like that. (What, it's Buffyverse. It might.)
Morray: 0:
Ethan: 2.5, 3: Do you want to think that hard about his sexuality? No? Neither do I. ._.
Aloysius (Dessoir): 0:
Nick: 1: Sexuality, as I started writing this the other night at like 4AM, is kind of a habit for Nick. Baseline: he's straight. He's a straight man who finds women attractive and would be more than happy to take specific examples to bed with him. He flirts as a matter of course, partially because that's often how people interpret his brand of friendliness and out-of-place intensity and he doesn't object responding like that was what he meant all along, partially because it's fun, partially because it's both a means of keeping people at a distance and provoking reactions that interest him. He doesn't look for relationships; he's not, generally, an asshole about it but he's probably not going to call and friends-with-benefits is about as far as he's usually willing to go.
That analysis, granted, mostly looks at Nick before he came out the other end of death with a bit of a different perspective on his self-imposed cheerful isolation, a hell of a case of PTSD and loneliness he'd never really had before and didn't know how to cope with. As it is; before death, Nick didn't even really make friends - not the sort you keep up with more than casually - and after death he's starting to consider that if he's going to get by as he is now, he can't do that. It was fine the way he was, but it's no longer okay for his mental health to isolate himself. So he's cautiously making more human connection, and because I wouldn't be talking about it unless it were relevant here, sexuality plays into that as he sort of sidles unexpectedly into a relationship with Alya Sadova that he has yet to properly define for...anyone. Much less himself.
Like his casual approach to manipulating other people ('does it like breathing'), he'd probably flirt with other men as a means of trolling for lulz (he's kind of a bastard, sorry, but the harmless and well-intentioned kind) or manipulating them for one reason or another.
(Also: age gaps are one thing; significant ones with obvious maturity differences are quite another. He's a psychiatrist and he specialized in children and adolescents; please keep your daddy issues out of his pants.)
Belgarath: 0: STRAIGHTEST MAN IN STRAIGHTLAND
Gilly: 0, 0.5:
Elizabeth: 2:
Ramirez: 0.5, 1:
all of you waiting to see agent k's should feel ashamed.
1) List your main pups. Or all of your pups. And potential pups. Whatever, have fun.
2) Take a look at the Kinsey scale.
3) List and explain an area on the scale for that given character, giving specific examples if you'd like, or multiple numbers based on your rationalizations.
4) Know your pup just a little better.
Martel: 0: Martel's formative years and significant parts of his adolescence and adulthood were spent as a devoutly religious man who went into a religious order; his social circle was pretty open-minded and progressive for the place and era, but societally he was raised with the concept that homosexuality is a sin. He's straight up heterosexual and has very little interest in other people's sexual proclivities beyond "do you mind not getting slut all over my nice boots, it just doesn't go with my vibe" (yes, he's an asshole, yes, he probably said something worse than that to Arissa) or "i know places where they burn you for that, you should maybe not be doing it in public".
His sexuality is much like the rest of him; he wants to be in control of it and he's obsessive about what he perceives as belonging to him (CANDICE I AM SO SORRY IN GENERAL). He's not generally fixated on sex inherently; Arissa killed his libido like a heat-seeking missile and I imagine between running around trying to fuck up Sparhawk's life and running around trying to make plans to fuck up Sparhawk's life, all the while being stuck with the aforementioned horrifying princess & her former-churchman ex-lover, he had neither time nor inclination to hook up.
Generally he's not the kind of man who is comfortable with casual sex and absolutely if you betray him in any way he will destroy you and everything that you love. And then be angry about it for twenty years. Just FYI. During the time where he was tooling around as a lone mercenary making himself The Scariest Ever, he didn't relax this so much as adapt it; he had basically cut off if not totally destroyed all personal connections he had and people need those, he made do with occasionally seducing women he would probably not give his real name and almost definitely never see again after maybe a week, tops.
He probably has bastards in Eosia! Enjoy that. (sob)
He doesn't feel threatened by...much of anything, frankly; one of Martel's big characteristics is "ego the size of the moon", he is arrogant and often he is not actually wrong to be so confident, but that's a whole other thing and you know he could stand to be less of a tool about it. Homosexuality doesn't bother him and doesn't concern him; if he were hit on by a man it'd depend on who and how as to how he reacted, and could be anywhere from 'no, thanks, not my thing' to '*knifes*'. The latter is less to do with sexuality, more to do with the fact sometimes Martel is inclined to kill people. Um. As an example (of Martel not killing anyone...hi), while in TRoM he firmly and repeatedly rejects any possibility of taking Emperor Sarabian to bed with himself and his wife, it's more or less the same way he continues to ignore Empress Elysoun, and he's amicable, even friendly with them, as they work together.
(COMPLETELY HETEROSEXUAL)
Donna (Poly): 2, 2.5: Significant parts of Donna's "issues" involve or relate to her sexuality, one way or the other. Hooray! That in mind:
Donna is basically bisexual, which is in fact how she identifies. She's had more relationships (sexual and/or emotional) with men than women for the following reasons: convenience, what she believes is expected of her, what she believes she can get out of them, and the fact she believes she values women more than men and generally speaking, they can and should do better than her. (A man looking at her and seeing a slut is Tuesday afternoon; a woman looking at her and seeing a slut is wrist-slittingly painful. Why yes, she does have mommy issues! How could you tell.)
She operates with a lot of internalized misogyny, at the same time as this; she's forced herself into an image that she believes is what people expect or want from her, and it is, in fact, significantly based on the perceived sexual preferences of men - often older than she is, inevitably considered by her to be "more intelligent". Donna uses sexuality like she uses anything else, to draw people to her and make them trust/want/need her when she doesn't trust them but needs somebody to validate her and tell her she's pretty and desirable. This is often mostly how she defines her self-worth, which she is aware is fucked up and unhealthy, but she hated therapy and after years of learning to adapt herself to whatever she thinks suits a situation, she's afraid there's nothing left under that and that if someone asked her to drop the act she would have nothing to give them.
She's at the same time deferential and defiant with men; she insists loudly and at length what she doesn't need and makes downright misandrist comments to prove she doesn't need them, not a little bit, not even at all...and then she has no idea what to do without one to bounce off.
She likes sex; she genuinely likes to be touched, be it for platonic or sexual reasons. She also likes the idea of being in control of an encounter - of someone else. Donna gets off on seducing men she perceives to be more intelligent and more powerful than she is, and if she can get them to keep coming back - even better.
Women are fascinating to her; she doesn't believe she has the same worth as most women she knows, but she wants to, and wants to impress them and please them. They're attractive and she can easily fall in love with them - the reason she doesn't as often 'go for it' is that for her sex has become so often a power trip or a contest (with herself, with the world), and she rejects applying that to other women. She doesn't want to treat them the same way and she doesn't know how else to relate sexually; she's pretty young, frankly, and she has time to learn and work through this stuff, but she might not ever.
(BISEXUAL...OPPORTUNISTIC)
Lourdes: 4: While it's a fair point that Lo's older alt is monogamous with a man, this is true of both of them. (Monty/Lo was a luck out, really; she defaults to women before men and Carla or one of the other Gotham girls before anyone.) Lo likes to be dominated by women, but will 95% of the time reject it (violently, enjoy that) from a man, who probably did not anticipate being topped by a tiny, pretty little thing covered in pink and glitter who doesn't care what his name is and thinks 'sweetie', 'baby' and 'honey' are suitable alternatives at all times, even if she's actually going to knife him later. Hooray! You'd think...everything about her ever would be at odds with her devoutly Catholic faith; and it ... kind of is, frankly, but Lo is batshit fucking insane and this is reflected in more or less everything she does. Whether it's immediately obvious or not.
Women are what Lo likes best; they're pretty and they're just better. They're who she wants to spend time with, have sex with, fall in love with. Men are usually a means to an end or a game of some kind; she finds them attractive, sure, but at the end of the day, he's just a man, isn't he? (Monty is the bewildering exception to this rule; they suit each other surprisingly well, but Lo herself had moments where she considered bolting back to Gotham and her girls, baby in her belly and all, before they went through with the wedding.)
TinyLo might actually even be 4.5-5.
(PREDOMINATELY HOMOSEXUAL, BUT MORE THAN INCIDENTALLY HETEROSEXUAL)
Enfys: 2.5: (would claim 0, maybe 0.5) Enfys is so far in the closet that she should just start fucking Mr Tumnus and be done with it; she's bisexual, which she's known if not wholly acknowledged (ever) since she was in her teens. She identifies ostensibly as straight; her flirtations with women have always carried an implied "I do anything for attention/I'm married so this is just friendly teasing". Both of which (until her separation & subsequent divorce, for the latter) were generally true, as far as they went; Enfys will do all sorts of things for a reaction, short of actually fucking another woman. She's a crazy, crazy little troll.
Enfys has had very few relationships of much significance in her life; her first boyfriend was followed swiftly by her second boyfriend, who has been it for most of her adult life; they married in their twenties and even after separating from him, Garion was a large point by which she defined herself. It took her six years (give or take) to finally decide that she had passed the point where she could have saved their marriage and divorce him, and like it or not she still feels for him pretty deeply. Sagramore was a partial catalyst for that; she's not in love with him (though she occasionally wishes she were/could be), but she couldn't continue involving herself with him in good conscience without facing up to how far her marriage had gone. I'm digressing!
Enfys wanted more boundaries than she properly got, as a teenager, which in those formative years...sort of...developed into a kink of sorts; Garion was the least interesting to Enfys when he let her win, and held her attention for so long partially because he'd fight with her and she didn't always win. He learned how to deal with her forcefully and it was...what she wanted. (Horrible fact: since Blake Angler was what they initially fought about the most, technically Garion kept her interest by ... being jealous of the guy she would've otherwise been involved with. What.) Enfys wants someone to, uh, take her in hand. Great! (Enfys has never been more intrigued by Sagramore than when he yells at her. I don't even know.)
She's never allowed herself to explore her sexuality any further than "I like men, it doesn't matter, stop trying to make me grow as a person and not be a nutcase". She was raised Irish Catholic, and though much of her throwing herself into the faith was based on spite (...yes, it's a long story) and bone-deep she is not, herself, actually a Catholic, a lot of things rubbed off. Like 'homosexuality is not okay'. She adopted these practises and beliefs for herself, and that was one of the things she took away - and as the latter half of her adolescence she had only her father (an Irish-Catholic ex-cop), who she takes after but had never really been primarily parented by to lean on...concern for how he'd see her if she admitted that outweighed honesty, which she (a habitual liar) doesn't really value properly anyway. John probably would've had an unfortunate initial reaction and calmed down; Enfys's relationship with her father deteriorated so much she never allowed herself or him the opportunity.
(PREDOMINATELY HETEROSEXUAL, MORE THAN INCIDENTALLY HOMOSEXUAL. LIVING IN NARNIA.)
Gates: 2.5, 3: Gates is the original version from whence came Enfys; she is younger than Enfys Eddings, but strangely better adjusted. At least in some respects! The lack of devotion to Catholicism and never having lost her mother mean that some (most) things which defined Enfys's making camp in Narnia were never issues for Gates at all. Gates is pretty close to being a down-the-middle 3, probably the only thing that nudges her towards a 2.5 is the fact that she's only had two relationships in her life and they were both with men. One of these was never "consummated" (as it were), but Gates wasn't sleeping with anyone else for his sake and was very interested in going there.
Gates's first relationship, first time, first most everything was Anders Blakely; she waited 'til marriage to lose her virginity. Less because she prized it herself and more because she was aware of the occult value of virginity and hung onto it just in case she could use it for something. She got married instead! Anders and Gates's marriage did not last as long as their relationship had; they separated about six months after the wedding. Sans-Anders, she explored her own sexuality about the same way she does everything else; enthusiastically and well-documented (in notebooks, you gutter-dwelling bastards). While still legally wed, she never really looked for anyone else to replace him emotionally, and mostly continued this for several years after his death.
Gates doesn't look at sex as a romantic thing or something sacred; it's fun and it makes her feel good and it's much easier than sustaining a relationship, which she's never been good at and rarely has desire to try for. Men and women pretty evenly attract her interest; mainly she needs/wants someone who can keep up with her and pull her back when she needs pulled back. What they've got in their pants does not concern her overmuch unless it's got spikes or something horrible like that. (What, it's Buffyverse. It might.)
Morray: 0:
Ethan: 2.5, 3: Do you want to think that hard about his sexuality? No? Neither do I. ._.
Aloysius (Dessoir): 0:
Nick: 1: Sexuality, as I started writing this the other night at like 4AM, is kind of a habit for Nick. Baseline: he's straight. He's a straight man who finds women attractive and would be more than happy to take specific examples to bed with him. He flirts as a matter of course, partially because that's often how people interpret his brand of friendliness and out-of-place intensity and he doesn't object responding like that was what he meant all along, partially because it's fun, partially because it's both a means of keeping people at a distance and provoking reactions that interest him. He doesn't look for relationships; he's not, generally, an asshole about it but he's probably not going to call and friends-with-benefits is about as far as he's usually willing to go.
That analysis, granted, mostly looks at Nick before he came out the other end of death with a bit of a different perspective on his self-imposed cheerful isolation, a hell of a case of PTSD and loneliness he'd never really had before and didn't know how to cope with. As it is; before death, Nick didn't even really make friends - not the sort you keep up with more than casually - and after death he's starting to consider that if he's going to get by as he is now, he can't do that. It was fine the way he was, but it's no longer okay for his mental health to isolate himself. So he's cautiously making more human connection, and because I wouldn't be talking about it unless it were relevant here, sexuality plays into that as he sort of sidles unexpectedly into a relationship with Alya Sadova that he has yet to properly define for...anyone. Much less himself.
Like his casual approach to manipulating other people ('does it like breathing'), he'd probably flirt with other men as a means of trolling for lulz (he's kind of a bastard, sorry, but the harmless and well-intentioned kind) or manipulating them for one reason or another.
(Also: age gaps are one thing; significant ones with obvious maturity differences are quite another. He's a psychiatrist and he specialized in children and adolescents; please keep your daddy issues out of his pants.)
Belgarath: 0: STRAIGHTEST MAN IN STRAIGHTLAND
Gilly: 0, 0.5:
Elizabeth: 2:
Ramirez: 0.5, 1:
all of you waiting to see agent k's should feel ashamed.