I think this may relate to something I hit on in my post, but didn’t realize at the time: I feel that generally, people are very sensitive to gender non-conformity. Yes, there are (often GNC) people who don’t mind or even enjoy having both strongly “masculine” and “feminine” traits within one character (including the PC), but most people like to feel like a character conforms to the gender they chose for the character.
Trans, cis, and non-binary people are equally justified in not wanting to feel gender dysphoria, but I’m sure it can feel unfair as an author when readers assign seemingly arbitrary gender values to what is intended as gender-neutral by the author themself. I believe the Captain should come across as gender-neutral, but everyone brings their own experiences and biases to the table, including me.
For my part, I like when an author allows any given character to be gender-selectable. I find that it allows for more flexibility with gender presentation even when the author didn’t think that hard about making GNC characters, which I think is the real barrier to inclusivity: actually thinking “Hey, I should make a character who isn’t my ethnicity, sexuality, and/or gender presentation”.
I think this is where I’m not entirely comfortable joining you in referring to the strongly binary social system of AotC in terms of “gender roles.” See, I agree that making things needlessly heteronormative (finding “masculine/feminine” categories everywhere as if they’re a true human universal) is both cliched and problematic.
But isn’t there at least a little of that going on if we treat any dominance-submission relationship binary in a fantasy world as “gender roles” – even when as in AotC it’s very explicitly and intentionally disconnected from sex? If we read AotC and say “the monarch is masculine and the MC is feminine,” doesn’t that choice of language introduce the cliche from our world to a gameworld that’s been explicitly written to escape it?
The very intentional message of AotC’s worldbuilding is “gender roles are really about power, not sex.” It imagines a world where you could have Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn dynamics purely as a result of economic and social pressures, regardless of sex or orientation. (Plus a fudge to the mage-politics system, the Life/Death mage alternation in the monarchy, so that there’s a non-gendered parallel to the pressure to produce a male heir.)
Absolutely, it keeps the binary social structure to be able to tell a Henry-esque “Choice of the Consort” story – the original working title, much more apt than “Romance” for my money – and if you don’t like that, I understand and am not going to talk you out of it. But I still think it’s worth recognizing that it was written as a deliberate critique of gender binaries, in a way that I’m not at all sure that e.g. Omegaverse is. (I’ve barely drifted across Omegastuff on AO3, and what I’ve seen didn’t bring me back for more.)
Our ability to choose the sex and orientation of the AotC protagonist and ROs does make it a little harder to avoid all cliches. Read AotC with a straight male MC and the story is obviously steering in the opposite direction of cliche–whereas with same-sex attracted MCs, as you note, it’s easy to read it in terms of stereotypical masc/femme dynamics.
But I think focusing only on the latter yields an unnecessarily uncharitable reading. Not quite on the level of e.g. invoking the stereotype of the queer-coded villain to criticise a CoG villain game that gives you the choice to be LGBT. But by putting all the focus on how the narrative reads from one of the possible MC perspectives, it doesn’t do justice to how subversive and un-cliched the overall project of AotC is.
I whole-heartedly agree–even if I think AotC stands up better today than you and Eiwynn are suggesting.
I think it all comes down to this, honestly. I have no preference either way but I definitely have a stronger image in mind for characters that have predefined genders because there’s no extra filter in my mind. If everyone discussing them is using the same pronouns and gendered terms, drawing fanart of them in that same gender, the author answers questions about them with that same gender, and all the terms go from gender neutral to gender specific, it just becomes that - more specific and reinforced. And when enough images are built through that osmosis then the character can end up feeling more defined regardless of the actual narrative. I’ve never understood the mindset that gender has to “matter” in the narrative to justify a character with a defined gender. They might just feel or be seen that way by the author.
I feel like as long as it’s referred to as “gender roles” and not “social roles” then such message is always going to come across muddled. “Gender” is simply too tied to “sex” in common use to avoid this sort of mix-up and prevent sexual aspects from impacting perception that it’s, at least in part, about it as well.
Fair enough, here’s the longer-winded but more precise version of the message: “Real-world gender roles are fundamentally about power, not physical sex, and to illustrate that we’re witing a gameworld where an otherwise similar set of binary social roles are clearly not about sex.”
I know in my experience of writing, it’s often been that simple. My men are men because they are, just as my women, my genderfluid, and nonbinary characters are.
Though, sometimes I’ve had to ask myself “why?” of course; the protag of my current project is a man because I want to write a softer, more nurturing sort of protag and I would feel less interested in this character if they were a woman, because of my experiences of being socialized as a woman. Possibly for this same reason, I also have a habit of writing women who are brash, stoic, or abrasive.
However, my protag’s nonbinary kid is nonbinary because they are. They just feel that way to me, and there really isn’t anything more to it than that.
I think one thing that’s easy to overlook about Affairs of the Court is that it’s not a romance game, despite the original title, and it was written well before the expectation was established that every game should include a variety of attractive romance options.
The relationship with the Monarch isn’t depicted as healthy or aspirational. Thrilling, absolutely, and replete with covetable perks, but once the luster wears off you’re walking a pretty scary tightrope. There’s absolutely a binary - one partner powerful, concerned with matters of general import, and sexually assertive; the other expected to be submissive, concerned with childbearing and the home sphere, and sexually receptive while also tasked with the responsibility of maintaining their allure - but it isn’t normalized, it’s critiqued. Divorcing this binary from the biological and social considerations that have historically underpinned it is supposed to enable us to take a hard look at just how much sense it actually makes.
People have asked me which of my mothers is “the man,” and yeah, that’s pretty messed up, but is it really any less messed up that no one’s ever asked me the same question about my marriage, because they just assume they know (because exactly one of us has a penis)? (For the record, neither of my mothers is the girly-glam type, and yet they both perform femininity far more than I do.)
The PC of Affairs of the Court is a person who maybe wants to be powerful, definitely wants to be happy if possible, but above all wants to survive and thrive in the world they live in - and all they have to do it with is the tools society allows them. If that means subtle manipulation, strategic sexuality, and weaponized dependency, so be it. And if those things feel inherently feminine to us, I think that speaks less to the designers having a specific kind of player in mind and more to them wanting us to reflect on why.
But I still think it’s worth recognizing that it was written as a deliberate critique of gender binaries, in a way that I’m not at all sure that e.g. Omegaverse is. (I’ve barely drifted across Omegastuff on AO3, and what I’ve seen didn’t bring me back for more.)