@Talyrion The football aspects of the story aren’t the main focus of the story, but they are important for the story. So really explaining on those issues would take away from the story, if that makes sense.
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That does make sense. Like a lot of people have mentioned, making a gender-selectable MC work often depends on how you treat gender as a subject within the broader cast. As far as tips for giving a female MC more impact without writing a whole separate route/game for them–have you considered making the “generational talent” match the MC’s gender?
As in: a male MC inherits the talent from their father, while a female MC inherits from their mother. This allows you to nod to the idea of sexism or inequality in the sport from a distance. Instead of the MC fronting the challenges of national perception, their mother did it. (In the past, off-screen and alluded to by NPCs occasionally.) It would be less work than trying to take on an additional, heavy topic that isn’t the focus of your work–but it still acknowledges that it’s there and provides an explanation for why a female MC isn’t dealing with it now.
(Is this for the False Ancestry game mentioned on the Interest Thread, btw? If so, some of the “male-centric” aspects could also just be coming from the disparity between the number of female ROs vs male ROs.)
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The player character’s parents have nothing to do with the sport, and I can’t really change that without causing major issues down the road.
It is, but the female beta tester wasn’t referring to the gender ratio of the ROs. I can’t really change that short of adding another RO, but that causes more issues with how the story is as integrating another storyline into it will not be fun.
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Oh! Then does “generational talent” refer to once in a generation as opposed to inherited from a previous generation? Thanks, I learned something!
In any case, you might just need to keep going with the story until your beta-readers can give you more specific feedback. Given your game’s premise and genre, I can see why delving too deeply into the gendered aspects of the sport might seem out of the way. But without a better picture of what you’ve got going on, it’s hard to give any advice that isn’t purely speculative or already covered by someone above.
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In any case, you might just need to keep going with the story until your beta-readers can give you more specific feedback. Given your game’s premise and genre, I can see why delving too deeply into the gendered aspects of the sport might seem out of the way. But without a better picture of what you’ve got going on, it’s hard to give any advice that isn’t purely speculative or already covered by someone above.
That’s true, a second female beta tester is currently helping me go over each part of the story that can feel less male centric, and I will just improve with what she points out.
And the demo is almost done being rewritten, might hit 40k words and cry as I will have to fix every typo in those 40k words.
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I’m very inexperienced, so please take this with a grain of salt, but perhaps the problem isn’t in how the world is treating your MC but rather how your MC is limited in their interactions with it. Maybe the problem is that the choices you are giving to the reader don’t let them roleplay as a woman, at least not in the way they would want to.
You said you’ve already implemented external acknowledgements to the female MC’s situation, which is great but what about internal ones? Are you letting the reader pick and choose how their MC is expressing themselves as a woman? How would a woman who is passionate about football feel in that situation? What would they want?
Maybe they see it as just a hurdle, a challenge to rise to, another point of pride whenever they succeed. She’ll smile just a little wider whenever she scores a touchdown, because take that world! This is what she’s meant to do. Or maybe she, unlike most people, has no trouble reconciling these seemingly paradoxical aspects of herself. She can enjoy a dress, and she can enjoy the thrill of the game, and there’s no reason one can’t go with the other. Maybe she does feel the pressure, she’s defensive because she feels everyone is judging her, waiting for her to make a mistake. So she gets cocky, her smiles have an edge, or everytime that she fails she’ll take it worse than she should. Or lastly, maybe football is actually a big deal for her, a way of expressing parts of herself that don’t fit the mold. She doesn’t want to stop being a woman, it’s still who she is, but this is an outlet for feeling new feelings, exploring new ways to live life.
You could try asking your beta reader what moments made them feel the way they did, and what choices would they have liked to have at any moment.
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I see, the football isn’t nearly as important to the story for me to go into that detail for the male player character or the female character. It is somewhat explained in the story and certain choices, but you would have to read it to understand.
Of course, we’d only expect to see these factors worked in to the extent that football is significant to the story. If football were the main focus of the game, you probably should touch on most of them; if there are only a couple of football-related scenes, a few fleeting references would be fine. From what you’ve described, I’m guessing it’s somewhere in between, where it can be incorporated without having to radically rewrite the story, but you’re probably going to have to do a little research and be willing to make a few little changes if you want your story to be the best it can be.
It’s a little frustrating, because a lot of your responses so far have been reasons why you shouldn’t have to take our advice. And you’re absolutely correct about that - you’re under no obligation. You can tell yourself you know what your story needs better than any of us, and you might very well be right. But I said before that something’s got to give, and that’s true even if you simply maintain the status quo. You can tell exactly the story you want to tell exactly the way you want to tell it, but realize that doing so may well mean that the end result is less satisfying for your readers.
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I believe there a problem on the fact that American football and soccer as other sports have a division based on gender so a woman on male team sound absurd
If the football is only a part of the story and not main focus though, I’d say it’s perfectly possible it’s not even the problem, but the actual problem is elsewhere. There really isn’t a way to give advice without knowing what the issue is.
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Actually, since girls’ football isn’t a thing, a girl who wants to play high school football would almost certainly have to play on a team that was otherwise all boys. It’s an unusual situation and not an ideal one, but certainly not unprecedented.
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I plan to use a lot of the advice given such as adding a second female player on the team, but some things really aren’t needed in my eyes. The football aspects of the story are really non existent, if it was a football IF then I would use most if not all of the advice given.
But most of the problems and things that I could expand on where resolved in the story, since the player joined the team in their first year of high school and they are current in their last year and the captain of the team.
Again, as stated above. High schools can have female players on their football teams if they allow it. So it’s not really absurd.
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it is the problem, because that’s what the beta tester said was the problem in the first place. The genre of the book is supernatural with werewolf and vampires, that isn’t gender exclusive and most of the ROs are/written with different variations of how they act with the player’s gender.
Two of the Ros have very varying reactions to the player’s gender when it comes to romance, with one of them being straight and so same gender romance is locked out of their route. And the second character treating the opposite gender of their character completely different, from if they were the same gender.
There aren’t separate divisions of high school football separated by gender.
Title IX in the U.S. means that a school must provide equal opportunity based on sex, including sports.
It means that if a school does NOT have a female football team, they must allow a girl to play on the male football team. And I know of no American high school that has an all girl football team.
Yeah, it’s very unusual and not ideal, but it definitely happens.
I’m about to date myself, but back in the 1990s, my high school had a girl play on the football team. It was a small school (less than 200 students) and it certainly caused a bit of an uproar. Just as you mentioned in an earlier post, she got all the gossip and mean remarks directed at her implying she was sleeping with the rest of the team, gay, or some how both. She only played for two years, but she wasn’t half-bad. She was a line backer.
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