In which I think too much about something I probably won't do.
I RP a bit. I'm not in a ton of games, and I don't do it with a ton of people, but I do it, and I think it has a certain place. I can enjoy it. I don't really pay a lot of attention to it, though, outside of a very small list. I'm just not aware of most of what goes on in the wider RP world, and honestly, I can't be bothered to worry about it too much.
Sometime back now, a game was pointed out to me that made me sort of sad. It was a genderswitch game. And I felt the entire way it was handled... just missed the point. I'm not going to say it was wrong (...at the moment), I'm not going to delve into what they did, or call out anyone for liking their premise, but for me, for my tastes, for what I like about playing with sex and gender, it was about as poor a fit as you could find. I never paid attention to it after reading the setup. I don't know what became of it. I don't really care. It's beside the point of this post. What it comes down to is that it started me thinking about how I would handle this, if I were to do it.
And that part of my brain that likes to chew on things until they're dead had no interest in the fact that I'm not a person who should ever be starting a game.
So I just kept thinking of it from time to time. And thinking, and thinking, and thinking. I thought about a lot of things. I thought about what the premise could be that would explain such a thing, and yes, that probably gave me the most problem. I thought about what I'd like to get out of such a game, and what I'd like to see happening, rules, how I'd want to moderate, who I'd want to be involved, the tone. Pretty much everything you could think about, I thought about, which is pretty silly since I still kept telling myself that, no, no, only tragedy can come of this.
But this is something relevant to my interests, I suppose.
More recently, as I was wondering once again how to explain all the genderswitching (before we go any farther, yes, I know the difference between sex and gender, and yes, technically we're sexswitching, but it just doesn't have the ring to it; so yes, I'm deferring in my own journal to aesthetics rather than academic definitions), I found myself wondering about people who didn't fit into binary definitions of sex. If it were a fandom game, I know there are characters out there who are intersexed or neuter sexed, and how would I deal with that?
And how would I react if someone wanted to take someone who conformed to a binary and unsex them or intersex them. Could I say no?
Well, yes, actually I could, but it would depend on how and why they wanted to play with that. If I felt their reason was particularly disrespectful or fetishy, if I thought it was for the porn, then yeah, I could say no. But if someone in good faith wanted to play with that idea, how it would affect an individual, how it would influence social interactions, then no, I don't think I'd want to say no. I don't really have an interest in either forcing characters who in their canon aren't strictly male or female to those identifications, and I don't really like the idea of telling someone, hey, you can't play with these ideas.
So. In that case, i thought, the mechanism doesn't always work perfectly. It's default is total reassignment, but it glitches or interprets things differently from normal sometimes, so some people don't come out the same.
Does that mean some people are unchanged? Well. I think it kind of misses the fun, right? Except that then I started thinking that for a few, very rare characters, it could spice up the mix. However the number of those would have to be pretty tightly controlled, wouldn't it?
And now I'm not only over thinking, I'm actually making myself a ridiculous amount of hypothetical oversight. I didn't even really have a mechanism yet!
Oh, but then I did. And it was every bit as ridiculous as you'd expect it to be.
Long ago, an ancient culture created a prison world (for lack of a better term); inmates were gathered, processed, and settled there for rehabilitation or life long interment based of their crime. Part of processing involved being unsexed. A terrible, inhumane action, by my standards, but it fit in a philosophy of rehabilitation through control and resocialization, and removed the necessity of housing male and female criminals separately. It was also probably believed that it avoided sexual violence by removing the weapon involved (probably didn't work as well in practice as in theory). Eventually this culture died out, and their machines went dormant.
Then, something happened to restart them.
I don't know what. Maybe that's what that whole last Indiana Jones movie was really about. Who can say?
The important part is that these archaic automatons came back online, and they continued to follow their programming; unfortunately, untold amounts of time without maintenance left the mechanisms buggy. The default in reassignment became the "opposite" end of the spectrum, rather than neutralized. However some are still processed as they were meant to be originally. Others end up all over the spectrum. Very occasionally, the reassignment program doesn't kick in at all, and the rare individual is left unchanged, to deal with the guilt and resentment that follows that. Or whatever their IC reaction would be. People are collected by the system, based on the laws of a forgotten alien system, which may or may not be functioning correctly. These people are taken, processed--which means quarantine and reassignment--and then dropped on the prison world, in a post-apocalyptic settlement. Some of the infrastructure still remains, and it functions... to a degree. Other parts are completely lost.
So there you have it. People stuck on another world, post-apocalyptic, their sexes messed with. And then try to deal with that as IC and... if not realistically, per se, still as well as you can.
Of course, I doubt many people other than me would be interested in it. So this post has mostly been an extra special look into how my brain functions.
Sometime back now, a game was pointed out to me that made me sort of sad. It was a genderswitch game. And I felt the entire way it was handled... just missed the point. I'm not going to say it was wrong (...at the moment), I'm not going to delve into what they did, or call out anyone for liking their premise, but for me, for my tastes, for what I like about playing with sex and gender, it was about as poor a fit as you could find. I never paid attention to it after reading the setup. I don't know what became of it. I don't really care. It's beside the point of this post. What it comes down to is that it started me thinking about how I would handle this, if I were to do it.
And that part of my brain that likes to chew on things until they're dead had no interest in the fact that I'm not a person who should ever be starting a game.
So I just kept thinking of it from time to time. And thinking, and thinking, and thinking. I thought about a lot of things. I thought about what the premise could be that would explain such a thing, and yes, that probably gave me the most problem. I thought about what I'd like to get out of such a game, and what I'd like to see happening, rules, how I'd want to moderate, who I'd want to be involved, the tone. Pretty much everything you could think about, I thought about, which is pretty silly since I still kept telling myself that, no, no, only tragedy can come of this.
But this is something relevant to my interests, I suppose.
More recently, as I was wondering once again how to explain all the genderswitching (before we go any farther, yes, I know the difference between sex and gender, and yes, technically we're sexswitching, but it just doesn't have the ring to it; so yes, I'm deferring in my own journal to aesthetics rather than academic definitions), I found myself wondering about people who didn't fit into binary definitions of sex. If it were a fandom game, I know there are characters out there who are intersexed or neuter sexed, and how would I deal with that?
And how would I react if someone wanted to take someone who conformed to a binary and unsex them or intersex them. Could I say no?
Well, yes, actually I could, but it would depend on how and why they wanted to play with that. If I felt their reason was particularly disrespectful or fetishy, if I thought it was for the porn, then yeah, I could say no. But if someone in good faith wanted to play with that idea, how it would affect an individual, how it would influence social interactions, then no, I don't think I'd want to say no. I don't really have an interest in either forcing characters who in their canon aren't strictly male or female to those identifications, and I don't really like the idea of telling someone, hey, you can't play with these ideas.
So. In that case, i thought, the mechanism doesn't always work perfectly. It's default is total reassignment, but it glitches or interprets things differently from normal sometimes, so some people don't come out the same.
Does that mean some people are unchanged? Well. I think it kind of misses the fun, right? Except that then I started thinking that for a few, very rare characters, it could spice up the mix. However the number of those would have to be pretty tightly controlled, wouldn't it?
And now I'm not only over thinking, I'm actually making myself a ridiculous amount of hypothetical oversight. I didn't even really have a mechanism yet!
Oh, but then I did. And it was every bit as ridiculous as you'd expect it to be.
Long ago, an ancient culture created a prison world (for lack of a better term); inmates were gathered, processed, and settled there for rehabilitation or life long interment based of their crime. Part of processing involved being unsexed. A terrible, inhumane action, by my standards, but it fit in a philosophy of rehabilitation through control and resocialization, and removed the necessity of housing male and female criminals separately. It was also probably believed that it avoided sexual violence by removing the weapon involved (probably didn't work as well in practice as in theory). Eventually this culture died out, and their machines went dormant.
Then, something happened to restart them.
I don't know what. Maybe that's what that whole last Indiana Jones movie was really about. Who can say?
The important part is that these archaic automatons came back online, and they continued to follow their programming; unfortunately, untold amounts of time without maintenance left the mechanisms buggy. The default in reassignment became the "opposite" end of the spectrum, rather than neutralized. However some are still processed as they were meant to be originally. Others end up all over the spectrum. Very occasionally, the reassignment program doesn't kick in at all, and the rare individual is left unchanged, to deal with the guilt and resentment that follows that. Or whatever their IC reaction would be. People are collected by the system, based on the laws of a forgotten alien system, which may or may not be functioning correctly. These people are taken, processed--which means quarantine and reassignment--and then dropped on the prison world, in a post-apocalyptic settlement. Some of the infrastructure still remains, and it functions... to a degree. Other parts are completely lost.
So there you have it. People stuck on another world, post-apocalyptic, their sexes messed with. And then try to deal with that as IC and... if not realistically, per se, still as well as you can.
Of course, I doubt many people other than me would be interested in it. So this post has mostly been an extra special look into how my brain functions.