I have an idea for a sci-fi IF that’ll hopefully be juggling two different storylines that is between a brother and a sister.
The plan is going to be somewhere relatively close to the beginning of the IF the reader will be given the choice of who they want to play as and subsequently which storyline they’ll follow.
Once they’ve chosen, and after a “Are You Sure?” sort of follow-up, the reader will be locked into that storyline and subsequent gender until the very end.
My question is… how should that be labeled via tags?
If you have anymore questions about the idea itself, feel free to shoot me those questions as well!
What good timing - I just happen to be reading a new update when you sent this.
With regards to tags, I think the obvious one to start with would be SiFi …
The less obvious ones depends on what you intend to do with gender identification and then with preference …
Are the brother and sister CiS individuals or are they non-binary or perhaps, the reader will be able to chose …
What will the RO be like?
If you are going with a simple binary choice of brother/male sister/female then I’d most likely use both the gender-lock tags (male + female) …
If you are going to allow the brother/sister to have different genders based on choice, I don’t think you have to worry about a gender specific choice.
I hope this helps.
Also, no matter what you decide to do, someone most likely will offer push-back.
Currently, I don’t know if the gender identification of the alien society - yes, you play as an alien; so I guess “alien-locked”? - is similar to cultures found here on Earth.
I’m glad you mentioned nonbinary because that’s something I’ve really struggled with and I really want people to hit me with ideas! Ideally, I would add a third non-binary sibling, but I’m lost as to what their storyline could be since the brother goes off-world and the sister stay on their planet.
What I do know is that the siblings will be pre-set characters, so I don’t know if the reader will be offered the choice to identify as any other identity except Cis ATM, but that hinges on when I nail down how gender operates in that society.
As of now and probably forever, I will never offer ROs in my WiPs because I’m not experienced with writing romance and I’d probably botch it or inadvertently turn the romance into a tacked on romance.
Thanks for your suggestions! They’re really helpful!
@Gower - Is it possible to use both the gender-locked-female & gender-locked-male tags in the HG WiP section of the forums?
I believe you can’t use two tags that belong to the same group.
In this link, you can see the tag groups and the tags that belong to each.
I have an active post draft I’ve been meddling for months and I always wanted to use Sci-Fan and Hi-Fan genre together, but one won’t show up once either has been chosen.
Depending on how topic tagging works on Discourse, this is either a very simple or a surprisingly difficult problem which can only be solved by the staff. But for now, I’m not feeling good to tag Rachel here…
I was just putzing around in the Hosted Games section and created, but didn’t finalize a new thread, and I had the option of creating a new tag “gender-locked”, so that’s a possible option.
There is a choice where you determine the gender of the playable character, that’s gender-choice. How you treat the genders is much broader question, with a much more distinct split, but that’s ultimately a question of feedback, not a definitional change of anything.
- is similar to cultures found here on Earth.