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(06-26-2015, 01:53 PM)tortles Wrote: If this discussion is going to continue, I would rather it be about peoples LGBT characters and their experiences, both as a character and as a player behind them. Share your advice for others who may not have played one before, or maybe give a little guidance who players who may need a little help. I want to bring this back to something peaceful.
I play an androgynous genderqueer bicurious woman. I don't state as much in-game, because obviously these concepts are not really extant in Eorzea, but it's pretty obvious when anyone interacts with her. She wears whatever she likes whether it's coded as feminine or masculine, wears her hair short, has an unusually androgynous figure (though I'm just lucky in this case that the in-game body models aren't too exaggerated), enjoys cute things as much as she enjoys guns and axes, speaks with an unusual cadence, and generally just confuses the hell out of people.
The thing is, it's not that it's a goal for her or anything like that. That's just who she is. And that's something that's super-important, I feel. In this world of binary gender it's too easy for people to get beat down because they showed interest in things that are 'improper' for their assigned sex, such that they can never really express themselves as much as they express what society has deemed to be an acceptable version of themselves. T'rahnu, on the other hand, has a background such that she just doesn't give a toss. In many ways, she's me liberating myself from my real-world constraints and putting all that could be into a single character (note: yes, I am well aware of the dangers of IC-OOC bleed here, and I assure you I won't take things personally if you're critical of her personality or what-have-you).
Without that degree of separation between the real-world and the fantasy world, I just couldn't possibly do something like this. It's a bit sad, but that's how it is for me. And it was really only through my own created characters that I truly began to understand this side of myself. I think roleplaying has a lot of potential for things like this - for self-discovery and self-actualization. That's a wonderful thing, isn't it?