Yesterday I was looking at my very first Creme de la Creme outline to check something and found something I’d completely forgotten. The thing I do always remember about the first idea was that I was going to include a flippable sexist patriarchy/matriarchy.
So if the PC was male or nonbinary, society expects men to go to charm school and be decorative; if the PC was female or nonbinary, society expects women to be in that role. All the Gallatin students, and the PC, would have been the marginalised gender and the Archambault students would have been the dominant gender, whatever configuration had been set up. (Karson would have been the dominant gender also, although obviously they’d have been in a marginalised role, being lower-class staff.)
But also when I was first coming up with things, it was a homophobic setting as well! In that setup, gay relationships were tolerated amongst youth or as an eccentricity, but not taken all that seriously and very much expected to be a phase that was grown out of.
Which I’d entirely blanked out of my memory. I remember being inspired by Choice of Broadsides and the gay romance in that one; I think I wanted to incorporate that societally-forbidden dynamic for queer romances. The way I originally framed it wouldn’t have been evenly spread, though - there would have been two straight romances (Auguste and Karson), and the rest gay (Gonzalez, Hartmann, Max, Delacroix, and Freddie). For a variety of reasons that wouldn’t have been as popular!
I don’t think I put much thought into being nonbinary in that less accepting setting; I think there’s room for trans and nonbinary characters in cisheteronormative settings (I’ve been writing non-cis and/or non-straight characters in the real world for the secret project I’m working on, and in that one I do engage with some of the difficulties and joys involved in that) but at that point I didn’t have faith in my ability to explore it in a thoughtful way. I think I was right in that regard.
Also, in that very first outline Blaise, Florin, and Rosario didn’t exist! Gonzalez was originally going to be a secret royal who had decided to go to school incognito - I think because they wanted to have a taste of “normal” life. In the next draft I split Gonzalez in two to create Rosario, and added Florin and Blaise. Gonzalez went through a number of different first names as I changed my mind about their family background: Mateo/Mariesol, then Laurent/Laura/Laurie, then Jocelyn, and eventually Zuri (these changes occurred based on decisions about whether their parents were first-generation immigrants or if their family had lived in Westerlin for longer). Also, Delacroix was called Henri or Helene.
I’d forgotten all those early ideas and shuffling around: they took place in summer 2018, well before I started writing. Though I remembered that Karson was originally called Lucia/Luc, then Lucia/Luca, then finally Emily/Emil/Emile.
romance:sparkles: I like how the romance is less about “oh no, gay people!” and more about “I am going to be a gold digger” 
My games always include morally dubious paths that can result in personal gain at the expense of various things (or in some cases have the potential to blow up in the PC’s face, heh).
)
I really enjoy writing those paths even though they’re not usually the most popular ones!