A stereotype character developed as an individual, while harder to execute, is very much rewarding as a writer. A stereotype character developed as a caricature is mindless and what leads to issues.
I’m sorry your friend sees you as a non-individual … at least if she says that it seems she doesn’t but perhaps she will grow in your relationship as a friend over time.
Unsurprisingly, I don’t talk to that friend anymore. Not for anything related to that, though, all my friends stopped talking to me.
More on topic, most of my characters start off as a single idea, or trait, or even just their appearance, and then normally things rapidly go off track with whatever I planned. It’s also fun to subvert and play around with stereotypes.
But those depths almost never get explored beyond a very few select outlets like this site or some explicitly gay-focused ones. Mainstream media and AAA gaming almost always just gives us the superficial stereotype and nothing else.
I guess I can be a bit flamboyant in real-life too and yeah I just so happen to like clothes and men’s fashion very much (but in defiance of the stereotype I have a minimal interest in women’s fashion), but that is far from all there is to me.
On the other hand @ParrotWatcher for example is, by his own admission, far less interested in fashion or looking fashionable than I am and that doesn’t make him any less gay. (correct me if I misremembered dear watcher of colourful avians) .
Point is gay people are people and we are just as or perhaps even a bit more varied then our straight counterparts. 
Yep, it does. Add to that the re-used dance animations for the female mc, so he’s leading the male mc on a dance that clips and looked very awkward, like he would a woman.
Also add to that the fact that the one truly designated “gay” ro, seemingly came right out of a bad 1990’s sitcom and couldn’t stop talking about his female friend and his desire to make babies with her. 
They clearly added gay content in the cheapest, laziest way they possibly could have done in that game, which is unfortunately nothing new for mainstream media or AAA gaming. But it is neither quality nor quantity representation and helps promote hurtful stereotypes.
@Eiwynn says what I was clumsily trying to much better and more succinctly there, so allow me to repeat it.
The problem with writing stereotypical LGBTQ+ characters, is that some people base their entire idea of what these people are like on what they see in media. The more nuances you are exposed too in any given minority, the more chances you have to start identifying with them, and the harder it is to dehumanize them, and think in us-and-them terms.
Also, most of the stereotypes of LGBTQ+ people have been used for comic relief, and carries that association with them.
As far as I’m concerned: good fashion means “dull greys and blues”. 
My birds are certainly more colourful than I am.
Unfortunately not many folks look past what they first see.
I for example do not look like a guy BUT I have the equipment. To most I’m some tomboy chick cause I’m too pretty to be a dude, foul mouthed, sarcastic and have a sense of style. Some guys that have asked me out were under that impression too… not all of them were okay with the fact I’m actually genderfluid. Some refused to believe it thinking I just wasn’t “into them or being a bitch.” It’s weird trying to convince folks that you’re not what they think you are, as if it’s on me to prove myself.
So fitting the stereo type of a tomboy yet being a physically effeminate (genetic male) is so far from what people are willing to believe that in their mind it’s impossible.
So stereotypes in my opinion are exceptionally annoying.
In regards to diverse queer representation for the sake of the queer people themselves, we should remember that people need more than just one point of similarity to really feel represented by a character.
If you are an abled white-cis-het person, you can probably be certain that you can find a character somewhere across all media who shares your interests, worldview, personality type, as well.
Can you say the same for an autistic, black, lesbian woman?
How about a pansexual, transmale, ex-muslim?
As a person who would have certain elements of the internet exclaim “SNOWFLAKE” in seconds, I am resigned to the fact that I will probably never find a character just like me, unless I create them myself.
But not everyone can/know how to do that, and if I can make just a few of those people get that feeling of belonging, of legality, with the characters I create in my stories, then I have done all I needed to do with my life…
EDIT - Oh, dear, that got way more dramatic than I intended. 
I guess I’ll mostly be chiming in to agree with what other people are saying (which is the main reason I’ve been liking up a storm, but not really posting) 
I mean, I myself am definitely on the more feminine side in a lot of traits, and I even feel myself to be feminine as an identity. (I tend to feel like the word “effeminate” is usually used with more negative connotations than just “feminine” is, but this could vary by person 
) So I really dislike the idea that writing a character like me would be problematic, because, I mean, I want characters like me to exist? 
It can be a pretty damaging double standard if gay characters “have to be” more masculine than the hetero ones, and can end up being rather a way to invalidate us feminine gay guys 
So… I’m really especially going to second @ParrotWatcher’s suggestion that it’s best if including a stereotyped character to also include someone who doesn’t fit the same stereotype… because it’s pretty generally best to show that members of LGBT groups have as wide a range of characteristics as everyone else. It also makes it so that you won’t have a single character who has to bear the brunt of representation on their own; that just puts a lot of pressure on that one character to be perfect, and no one character can be everything to everyone. But given enough characters in aggregate and you can accomplish a lot 
Because apparently in her opinion, it’s less homophobic to police how a gay man can behave than it is for a gay man to authentically be himself 
I should hope not 
I want to be in stories too…
I think that “that is far from all there is to me” is a good point as well… any character should have interesting traits and interests and personality dynamics that round them out and make them more than just a collection of stereotypes anyway.
Well, and as for me, I tend to enjoy male fashion in theory (i.e. cute guys in cute outfits) much more than in practice (which costs money and effort) 
(So my MCs in CoGs tend to be much more fashionable than I am )
Though, I definitely have noticed that people, even if they’re not homophobic in a hateful way, will often assume that I’m more knowledgeable about fashion than I really am 
stereotypes can affect how someone’s perceived even if they have no bearing on what the person’s actually like.
Oh, I agree there, but more because I didn’t have any money growing up and due to my height deficiency I just can’t pull off certain looks as well as I would like. Of course my mc’s in fantasy and sci-fi settings also tend to enjoy a lot more fashion options and freedom then I do, even if I were to wake up in my dream body tomorrow.
Yep, I’ve had it too with women somehow assuming I’d be knowledgeable when it comes to their designer handbags, or women’s fashion trends in general as well, when my interest in fashion is pretty much limited to the male and some unisex categories.
Well there’s nothing wrong with making a character like yourself as long as you do something fun with that character.
In my WIP the character Vyde is a fem-manly gentleman. A dude that looks feminine yet is a very powerful and even fearsome character being the most powerful being of his kind. Then again I was aiming to shatter the stereotype of weakness and femininity.
More about my frankly awful friends, when I came out, they started asking me about fashion and makeup, even though at that point in my life, I was quite masculine. Even when I started becoming more effeminate, I still knew very little about women’s fashion, despite the fact I wear women’s clothes due to be 4’11’'. The only thing I really know about women’s clothes is that there is way more dedicated shop space for them.
Also, I made the mistake of sharing my stories with my friends, and they either wanted: A. For me to make self-inserts of them, and pair them with my gay characters, or B. They wanted all my male characters to be in relationships because it was “so hot”. They also once tried to set me up with a random gay guy they knew and I’d never met. I won’t even get into how badly that went and how awkward it was.
Now, the fashion thing is interesting. I am really into goth fashion and some people were surprised by it and said things like “Wow, I never knew a gay guy that was into goth stuff”, and yet, there’s some people that says that the goth fashion just looks too gay, in fact, some bullies used to call me a fag because of it. At least I’m glad that most goths I’ve known are very accepting of LGBT people.
Yet still, I usually fit some stereotypical traits, I enjoy art stuff and things like theatre, I have more female friends than male friends and I don’t like things that are traditionally male, at least in my country. So yeah, I’m glad to see that people dont consider these things as necessarily bad representation.
I also want to (re) add and emphasize a point I made over in the Mass Effect thread earlier. Basically it boils down to this, Bioware’s lazy habit of transplanting what are essentially modern-day Canadians into their fantasy worlds makes them culturally more like contemporary Canada then whatever their originally devised lore would seem to imply, as it is trumped by always having the characters designed like contemporary Canadians with contemporary Canadian norms and values, with everything that implies, including a greater emphasis on gender issues and privilege in certain cases then their own lore indicates there should be.
While ideally @ParrotWatcher is right that small differences should be sufficient the reality is that due to the still vast differences in perception between male/female in modern society and the fact that I want my fictional mc’s to be seen by their potential ro’s as desirable guys means that in practice greater differentiation is sometimes necessary.
The writers around here, such as @Moreau and @Havenstone and many others who build more genuinely different and egalitarian (or at least less gendered) fantasy cultures put in a lot of bloody hard work to truly make them different and make them have verisimilitude and shine. That is something Bioware, even before being subsumed by EA has always shied away from, likely for (misplaced) fear of alienating contemporary audiences.
In more gendered settings my mc’s (much like myself) tend to like to be treated socially and culturally as male and masculine, something the botched male and Reyes fling in Andromeda and later Jaal conversion to “bi” fail miserably at.
Yeah, bioware’s tendency to apply modern Canadian values to their worlds are biggest weakness. It is also pretty symptomatic in Dragon Age, we just got lucky with gender and sexuality because the DA team always have had a diverse range of writers, but when you look at stuff like race, religion and ableism DA’s pretty bad. (ME actually does a little better a race, simply because their human at least tend to come from a wider range.)
That being said, most writers take stuff like versimilitude and pop-history and uses it as an excuse to write bigoted because it is ‘realistic’. It seems that when it comes to fantasy all people can imagine are the not-renæssance (which they call not-middelage, because most writers actually doesn’t now that much about history) and then they only apply to stuff like gender and sexuality not to stuff like how to think about the individual humanity, faith or general morality (you know stuff which really were different, whereas people of different sexuality always has existed.)
Bioware at least goes modern values all the way through. So when I can’t have my mage elf be happy at the death of a symbolic leader of an institution which oppresses people like her twofold, I at least also don’t have to suffer biogotry because my female protagonist happens to make googly eyes at Josephine.
.
Funny how “realism” in game-development, much like “artistic integrity” seems to be a bullcrap argument that only applies if the developers/publishers, for whatever reason (though usually plain old discrimination) don’t want to do something.
All those people throwing realism in my face (when asking for more and less stereotypical gay representation) on more mainstream forums always conveniently seem to forget about it when it suits their interests, like with say female bikini armour.
I only wish they went the opposite direction. “Oh no someone won’t like this so let’s censor or remove anything similar.”
I mean if your going to have skimpy chick armor where in holy hell is the skimpy dude armor! Instead of closing all the doors open them all up.
Appealing to one group and not the other is a problem so they decide they won’t appeal to anyone (ugly characters bad outfits ect.) I’d love if they appealed to everyone. Like in most hostage situations you don’t want to eliminate options because things only get more and more tense.
I vote for thong armor…
Sry there was a serious meaning in there somewhere but came out silly.
I think Alistair’s sexuality was stated to be hetro. Very hetro. I made a male elf mage and got shot down rather quickly by him.
I think it was a conversation about
A mod allowing alistar to be gay
In the story it wasn’t about his sexuality it was about the Templar thingy
And a mod allowing Dorian to be the opposite
With Dorian it was about him being gay and his parents trying to magically brainwash him straight. Nearly at every turn there is some point to his personality that points to his hatred of many ideologies of the home becuase of this interaction. His story was let me be me don’t force me to be what I’m not. Thus making him straight as our godfeather friend pointed out seems wrong in comparison to making alistar gay as nothing in his story would change. I think that’s what those two were trying to say.
While I’m all for alistar being at the very least bi (he is hot nice and smarter than he seems)
I’m a vanilla type of player (I don’t like installing mods) I play games the way the creator made them, which is honestly a mixed bag sometimes.
I made an elf female mage and I got with Leilanna and he wasn’t very happy, because of her being a nun.
I love the more equal sexuality WIP on the forum. As a straight man, I feel like who cares if a guy is gay, bi, hetro or ace! It’s his reality not yours!