(02-02-2015, 06:58 AM)hauntmedoitagain Wrote:(01-30-2015, 01:29 PM)Zhavi Wrote: I once had a character who was from a culture with very strict gender roles. Â Due to a choice she'd made, she'd become something of an outcast, and was stripped of her gender (I had a word for it, in a cultural sense it pretty much just meant that making babies with her was a huge no no), so she left to go wandering. Â But she kept those ideas, and had very rigid thoughts about what women should do (namely staying home and defending home and children and raising the children), and what men should do, and when sex should happen and when it shouldn't.
Finding people who wanted to rp with her was a very difficult task. Â She was short, ugly, stubborn, and prideful (any conversation with her would include the word 'honor' more than once), and it was interesting how some people who tended to stick to beautiful, elegant, sexy characters and interactions would not only avoid her, but me, as well, on an ooc level.
While there may have been a few that rejected this character for their outward appearance, I'm actually going to say that it was more likely that a character such as this simply isn't pleasant to be around in the slightest. A lot of roleplayers are a. female and/or b. fall somewhere in the LGBT spectrum and thus get enough of this regressive crap in real life to not want it in their game. Not saying everything has to always be sunshine and rainbows, but some things hit too close for home at times.
Given the community, one that I had been in and around for ten years, I'm gonna say it wasn't that. The way that community is, there is a certain pressure to have a beautiful, strong character. There is a subtext that your character needs to be both powerful and attractive, and conventionally strong in that 'beautiful control' sort of way, where problems that arise are due to romantic drama and fights over territory.
Plus, too, I like to think that I am sensitive enough to be able to write it in a way where it is not overtly offensive -- and while obviously not everyone does want to rp with characters that push certain boundaries, the type and style of clique that that particular community perpetuates is the sort that prefers familiarity (beautiful characters who are elegant, powerful, and romantically available) over anything strange or outside of the box. It's the type of community where peoples' characters get together, and then there are ooc hissy fits when the male character does something the female character doesn't like. That sort of thing.
So I hear you, and yeah, her personality could have been some of it, but that was definitely not all of it.
