I just don’t get it. If a character is designed with strengths and weaknesses, quirks and personality, what makes them feel more defined If their gender is set? A lot of people seem to be of this opinion, but I just do not understand why?
So any comment or opinion would be helpful.
As a example character let’s take one Out of my mind.
The Person is captain of the town guard, the village is fantasy setting, a smaller village. The character is muscular and sturdy, preferred weapon is a bastard sword. The character has brown, shoulderlong hair, and hazel eyes the skin tone is tanned. The captain is known for being hard but fair, always trying that the villagers are Safe, but since the character has to report to the local Lord, the villagers are sometimes a little bit cold with the char. Hobbies are sewing, mainly mending gashes in the clothes and Walking around in the woods. The character is a bit clumsy, so they often stubb toes or Hit walls or furniture.
What would make this char feel more real by being Male, female or nb by definition and Not choice?
Edit to clarify(hopefully) Why would people feel the character described above would be more defined If I choose them to be female, than If the reader could choose their gender?
Sorry for the misunderstandings, still stupid me. I did mean a NPC char or romancable character not the MC
For some people it’s not necessarily what changes with the character internally, but it’s how external factors treat said character based on their gender. So people who like more hyper-realistic settings would argue that a woman being in charge of the town guard would never have been a thing back in the old times. I personally don’t like trying to portray something as completely historically accurate because of that, since we live in a world that constantly regresses on ideals after pushing them forward, and an author has the choice to write a version of history that simply didn’t regress in their ideals.
Then if someone wanted to write a hyper-realistic point of view for say, a NB set character. It could be described how it took longer to get back to the rest of the group because they had to go to a building on campus that had gender neutral bathrooms. Or for a man, if he was abused he might comment on how it’s so much harder to convince people that his abuse really happened since people have a preconceived notion that abuse never really happens to men.
Essentially, the main takeaway is that set genders can help define a familiar set of hardships a character had to overcome, and still has to overcome, in their everyday life. If you’re not going to have those hardships be part of your world, however, I’d argue that there’s no real reason why a set gender would help solidify the character at all.
EDIT: Sometimes it also just is a way an author envisions a character, too. If an author forces a character to be gender-selectable when they only want to write them as a single gender, it can make the opposite gender that they weren’t originally going to be feel like it was never meant to be there in the first place. And that’s cus’ it wasn’t. So, author satisfaction/artistic vision can be another part of it.
Ask yourself – in your example, why did you bother to define that character’s hair color, eye color, skin color and hairstyle? Does knowing these aspect make the character more real? If so, how?
edit: nvm. I misread your question as “how does character having a gender make them more real in general”, while it seems you’re asking about difference between gender being preset and selectable.
I feel that this is dictated by your world-building as an author.
Building on your character as presented – let’s say in this medieval world that tailoring and such work is normally considered a “man’s job” and nearly all of the prestigious tailors and seemsters are men.
So, by making the character a woman, you can explore the character’s journey into the world of being a master tailor/seemstress – her joy and sense of being seen when she meets one of the famous tailors at the Lord’s castle who is also a woman, for example.
By making the character male, you can explore his journey into the same profession from the other side. Perhaps explore his feelings and thoughts as he meets the same rare woman tailor as the woman above.
By making the character non-binary, you can often explore societal issues from an “outside the box” perspective … perhaps as a non-binary one encounter would feel different than a second.
I think gender determination is one more of the expectations, norms and experiences within a society where the characters are more than the character themselves “being” one gender or another.
The issues, ideas and perspectives the author wants to explore and ultimately, the story that the author wants to tell can all be influenced by crafting characters in different ways, including gender.
Set genders work if gender matters in your setting - it requires additional writing for two versions of the character otherwise, and it can get very overbearing if you want to have a balanced cast. If it doesn’t, changing genders without worrying too much about about implications is the way to go - I mean, when would a set female character be as much of a cold passionless dictator or ruthless merc-for-hire with no morale as her male counterpart? Almost never if her gender is set from the start. Changing genders of characters is often the only way to achieve anything like that - female characters are almost always softened and don’t show even nearly as many rough edges as male characters do when their gender is set.
I don’t have a strong preference; in my experience there’s fairly even positives and negatives to both, as a reader or writer. However, it tends to be easier to write gender based cultural differences and reactivity if you’re not writing it 3+ separate times. As such, I’ve noticed gender locked characters often have more of this. It is not vital or anything, but a lot of players’ immersion will improve when it’s there.
That, and because we don’t select someone’s gender in reality. It’s that tiny extra layer adding to the illusion that you could be meeting real people who exist as they are outside you. Sexuality I find you can forget about easier than gender since you’re usually not selecting “does X character like men or no?” but rather the character won’t reject you based on player gender. It doesn’t need to involve obvious input and can be plausibly denied in-game that the world is being manipulated to your preferences. Can’t say the same for the gender-flipping in most of the games I’ve personally read.
If what you’ve listed is everything there is to know about this character, and if people in this setting (as well as the readers) treat male and female authority figures exactly the same, then sure. There’s no more “definition” to be added here. But that’s not how most stories, especially not lengthy ones, tend to go down.
Say you’re writing a romance scene and the character shows up at MCs doorstep and brings them a bouquet of flowers. It’s a romantic gesture no matter what gender that character is, but it sends a different message depending on that gender. Coming from a male character it’s a very traditional, very “gentelmany” gesture that sells this character as a somewhat stereotypical cultured boyfriend. Coming from a woman, the gesture a little eccentric and it draws attention to how proactive she’s being, how she’s actively participating in a relationship instead of simply humoring someone’s advances. Neither variant of the scene is bad, and you could write a story where both work, but they will hit differently.
And that’s not even getting to scenes where sex is the sole focus point, such as… sex scenes. If you want to get steamy, you just gotta take gender of both characters into account, and I’m not just talking about the “mechanical” bits here. My intimate sequences are not very smutty or descriptive, and yet I still found them drastically easier to write when I knew the gender of both participants. Both for petty reasons (I’m still proud of that birth control joke I made) but also because it lets me instinctively recognize which bits the average reader would be comfortable with. Because whether we like it or not, that’s highly dependent on who’s doing what.
And those are just the most obvious, most universal examples. There are countless little ways the character’s gender interacts with the story and the reader’s perception of it, and ten times as many if you’re writing for a historical or history-adjacent setting. Most people are not gender-blind, and you may wanna keep that in mind whenever you write something with adjustable genders.
As far ROs specifically go, I’ve seen that some readers (not including me) are sensitive to the “intended” gender of a gender-selectable RO. If they suspect that an RO was envisioned as a gender other than what they chose during their playthrough, they might feel like they’re playing a “fake” version of the character. I’ll try to relate what I understand of this reaction.
To use your character to illustrate, the Captain reads as fairly masculine overall. Even though you pretty clearly intend for the Captain’s characterization to be gender-agnostic, if a woman-attracted reader chose for the Captain to be a woman, that reader might be disillusioned by the thought that she was “supposed” to be a man. This is specifically a reaction to the Captain being gender-selectable, not just lady!Captain being/seeming masculine.
So in this way, it’s not that a set gender adds anything to the character, it just avoids a particular way in which some readers’ immersion is broken, specifically in regard to a character they otherwise might be attracted to. I guess this only goes for readers who… I guess “self-insert” isn’t the term I’m looking for. Maybe just “identify with the player character”? I suppose most people don’t make their PCs romance ROs for the character development.
I actually don’t mind being able to choose character genders, and in fact I think in many cases it’s a good thing that makes a game more accessible to a greater variety of players, as long as there’s an option to choose each character’s gender individually. I don’t like it that in order for all the characters in The Play’s the Thing to be the gender I prefer them as, my PC has to be either bi or aro-ace.
I’ve tried to draft a post a few times, but keep getting stuck on various things that baffle me - so, I think all I can say is I sympathise, and I don’t really get much of it either.
There’s plenty of positives for both ways of writing, and, depending on the setting and how the game discusses gender, one may be better suited to a project than another, or it might just be up to an author’s personal taste. I do like that if authors include nonbinary characters in their gender-selection, it can result in more major nonbinary characters than are typically seen in a cast.
I also enjoy seeing gender-nonconforming characters, whether they’re selectable or not. (I always go hmmm, really? when I see things like “this selectable character was obviously intended to be a man because as a woman they’re too masculine” or “this non-selectable man may as well be a woman”.)
Like @AletheiaKnights mentions, I don’t love the system where selectable characters change based on PC orientation, because I might want to romance a man but not have every romanceable character in the cast be a man, etc.
I do have fondness for the patriarchy/matriarchy shift in Broadsides and Pendragon Rising… It was something I thought about doing in very early iterations of Creme de la Creme planning, but didn’t have the understanding/skill to figure out how I’d want nonbinary genders to work in a setting like that.
My feeling is that selecting an NPC’s gender, whether they’re an RO or not, takes me out of the game somewhat and makes me view the character as more of a fictional object that I control, like a little paper doll. It makes it harder for me to get back into inhabiting the MC and get as emotionally invested in an RO, knowing that I’ve tweaked their characteristics to my liking. Unless we’re some kind of terrifying wizard, we don’t go around in real life altering the genders of other people to suit our tastes, and I’d prefer my fiction to hew closer to life in this regard.
Plus, if I’m given the option to choose a gender for an NPC, the memory of those options lingers in my memory and I can’t help but see the character as three+ genders in one, a gender-fluid flux. That’s cool in some settings, but maybe not what the author is going for.
So it’s really not the gender characteristics as such that impact a character’s believeability for me, it’s the act of choosing that damages my connection to the characters, if that makes any sense (and it’s worth noting that I think randomized genders are delightful!). This is clearly not everyone’s opinion or preference, though, so I hope authors don’t feel dissuaded from having variable NPC genders if that’s what they want.
I think there are a various factors. Namely meta based, traditional perception based and convenience based.
Meta wise. It as others mentioned can stick out when you have gender selectable characters yet a character feels more in place as one of the options. Like looking at your example. A town guard with shoulder long hair and a hobby for sewing can give off signals when this information is found in writing that they may be more traditionally feminine coded. Or in certai periods. A far moree eccentric or character period wise than their opposite gender doing the same thing. So it can have thay innate feeling of a certain choice being more “canon”
Likewise. If you do not change the description and only change pronouns and their body to match the chosen gender. It can end up hurting the character if they give off a “tomboyish” vibe but are already masculine. Say that they have trouble fitting in with their friend group and that affects the way they act, but because this is gender choosable. Even though the issue is not inherently gendered. It can still feel off or gendered in the language itself. So to speak.
Lastly it is the fact that it is quite a good bit of work. Making sure the pronoun changes dont break. Adjusting names or choosing gender neutral names. And if you want to implement gender chooseable characters well. Adjusting entire text portions to better fit their chosen one so that it never feels like one gender is more canon.
What I’ve seen a few authors do, which I really like, is to include a “default” option, which basically means a preset mix of genders identical to what you would get if you chose to make your character bisexual in a game like The Play’s the Thing, but without it implying anything in particular about the PC’s orientation.
I also like the option to choose character genders individually before the story begins. It’s not something I would use on my first playthrough, but in some games that offer random genders, I eventually start gravitating to a particular headcanon, and choosing genders before the story opens reduces the immersion-breaking quality of having to choose on the spot.
And I absolutely would emphasize that there’s no one “right” way to do it. There are games with fixed genders in which it’s hard to imagine the characters any other way, and games in which randomizing the genders is a positive pleasure (and an interesting look into my own preconceptions), and I have favorites of both kinds. A lot of it depends on the author’s vision, and on what works for the setting. I think there’s room in the world for just about as many kinds of stories as possible, which is why I’m glad CoG, HC, and HG all exist with their own set of requirements.
I prefer gender locked ROs, like say I want to romance a female character but she only likes females and I cannot romance her as a male mc. It makes her feel like her own person with her own identity. Someone that is living, breathing in that world. It helps with the immersion. She is not just there to cater to the player. If I want to romance her, it is me that has to change and play a female mc.
But if there are 7 ROs and all of them are gender selectable or bi, then they just feel like token characters with different personalities that exist for the sole reason for players to pick which type of ROs they like. You know the usual, the childhood friend, the shy one, the tsundere, the flirty one, the angsty one, the serious one, the toxic red flag, etc.
Atleast, gender selectable is better than everyone being bi imo. I just roll my eyes when every single ROs in a game is magically bi lol. You’re telling me that I happen to come across seven people that I can pursue a romantic relationship with and all of them happen to be bi. Wow, what a wonderful coincidence.
I think I may have come across as a bit too sarcastic on the last part.
Ah, the great orientation argument. I just love that preferring tits or arse in the often very egalitarian worlds is so important it is character-defining even when it’s never brought up, mentioned or actually used.
I think this is the important part. I’ve only ever had an issue with genderflipping characters in one game, Affairs of the Court (which has a society with very strong gender roles, and the MC is forced into the “female” gender role while all ROs are from the “male” gender role), and even then, it wasn’t the ROs themselves that were the problem, per se, so much as it was the discrepancy between the societal gender roles and the actual genders. (And honestly, that could have made for a very interesting theme, but I don’t think it was intentional, and it definitely wasn’t something the story actually leaned into, at least in the route I played.)
EDIT: To be clear, the problem wasn’t “the gender roles were reversed”; I was playing as a gay guy, and thus pretty much all the characters were male, but they had gender roles assigned to them almost at random. (Which, again, would have been an interesting theme to explore, but the story didn’t.)
(And also the fact that genderflipping can lead to everyone being the same gender can be an issue as well, but if you’ve only got three ROs, it’s probably better to make them genderflipping and have a large variety of other non-RO characters. Meanwhile, if you’ve got seven or eight, it’s probably best to give them their own canon genders, if just to give the story more gender diversity.)
No, see, that’s just worldbuilding. In all of my settings, bi/pan people make up 80% of the population, with 5% each of gay, lesbian, straight, and ace people.
A small group of bisexual characters is no weirder than the same number of straight or gay characters, especially if it’s a setting where bisexuality is more widely understood/accepted/celebrated than in the real world, or is considered the default.
I don’t know how much I like that method, to be honest. It comes across like the author does have defaults in mind, which, then I’m like… why not make them non-selectable in the first place? I would rather give the player the ability to do it individually, or not at all, I think. As you say, though, there’s plenty of different ways and preferences of setting it up, if authors want to make selectable characters.
I am always interested when authors have a mix of selectable and non-selectable characters. It happens in Heart of the House and both of the Deathless games. I’d love to hear from the authors about where those choices came from.
And it’d be great to see more times where trans and/or nonbinary characters are included in a gender-selectable cast. Mostly it’s a case of choosing between an NPC being a cis man and a cis woman.
Or just more major nonbinary characters in general, selectable or not. There tends not to be more than one in a game’s cast, or else the PC is the only one around, which… does not feel fantastic! (I don’t really mind whether a nonbinary character has Conversations About Gender or not, or whether selectable characters solely have their gender reflected in pronouns, but it’s lonely when the PC is the only one.)
