I completely don’t care, the author can describe the players every frigging atom and in my head it will allways be a 10/10 7 foot version of me.
I even made a in head storyline where all the games are alternate realities and my mc is just traveling across them and taking other people’s identities
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Hah, I like that. Headcanon accepted.
Loaded and ready.
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Some games like lords of aswick or the infinity series have to be gender-locked to male to give them a bit of realism
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Yeah, but in fiction you can literally do whatever you want, so the realism argument doesn’t sell me on it
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This is a topic that interests me, broadly speaking.
It’s a very interesting one.
Everyone will probably agree with me when I say: it is possible for a female character to be written poorly by a male author. This, for example, may consist of a female character sounding ‘too masculine’ or ‘too much like a boy’ and so on.
I know this because it is something I’ve seen in reviews of novels. I know this because it is something I wonder when I write a female character. I know this because I’m sure I’ve read books where I’ve scoffed and thought that this woman sounds too much like a man.
But I know I’ve read books where female characters can have a masculine edge but not make me scoff.
Why is that?
But what does this mean? Isn’t this a form of gender essentialism? That is, the belief that there is some intrinsic truth to gender? That there are certain things that make a man a man and a woman a woman?
Doesn’t that clash with the belief that gender is purely a social construct?
To be blunt, I do not believe that many genderlocked stories are really doing it for ‘realism’ unless they are utterly factual historical fictions. I’m more inclined to believe that there are people who are more comfortable writing male characters, simply because male characters do not tend to invite such a level of scrutiny. No one has ever said ‘This male character doesn’t feel enough like a man’.
In Ye Olde Middle Europe Inspired Fantasy World, you can feature both male and female characters in the protagonist role. Why? Because the lead character is already spectacular in some way.
To the authors who feel they can’t write a female MC character correctly: why is that? What is it about women that you think makes them different that it needs to be proper or correct?
Speaking personally, I feel my female characters are often more interesting than my male ones simply because when I write men and too often fall back on my own thoughts and experiences, whereas I examine things more closely when writing from a different perspective.
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One thing I really can’t understand is how writers can leap into writing people from different times, social status or careers than them, or people using magic or undergoing traumatic horror without flinching and then somehow feel it is hard to write someone of a different gender than them?
Like, the difference is not that huge. We’re all people.
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Except in post 5 of this thread, and many similar forum discussions past. 
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Curse my use of rhetoric! 
But again, what I’d want to drill down to is: what does that mean?
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But in this context the player knows that the MC could also be female, so there’s an inherent comparison. If it were a static character in a novel, how often does one stop and question the manly-ness of a male character?
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I have never seen this happen. Tomboy is a thing you know. Plenty of ‘manly’ girls and women out there. Every time someone is accused of doing this, what I see happen is gender essentialist rearing their ugly heads.
What I do see happen is men writing things women rarely do. Such as thinking about their breasts all the times. But too masculine, nope. Because masculine women exist. (Just as the opposite happens.)
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Something came into my mind about a the word realism. When Russian Saga came out I pointed out how an openly nonbinary character wasn’t fitting into that setting in my opinion. Back than people were telling me that I shouldn’t look for realism in an obviously fictional work with more fantasy like than historical setting. Now what I would like is just this: How is an openly nonbinary character a better fit then a more independent woman?
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That’s very true! For example, I once read an excerpt from a novel where the very first thing the protagonist did was get out of bed and examine her specific body shape, her specific type of hair, her specific build, and so on. It was as if she was seeing it for the first time. I pegged it for a man writing about a woman and, unsurprisingly…
But, I mean, that’d still be bad writing if a man was writing about a man. Female or male, that’s not what people do when they first get out of bed. Or in general, really. Your body is your body and is, typically, unremarkable. So, surely that’s just bad writing in general. Would the prose be magically different if a woman had penned it?
I want to say the book Artemis by Weir is where I saw lots of the ‘female protagonist is just a teenage boy with boobs’ sort of comments on Amazon.
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Couldn’t you play a woman there?
Since when has comments on amazone qualified as something to take serious? I haven’t read the books so I can’t comment on them, but I certainly don’t think that comments on the internet have any value.
And for all we know (since it mentions boobs) the protagonist is one of those way to pre-occopied by her own boobs protagonists.
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I could I guess but my question was about that. Let me try to rephrease it: How is realism a more walid argument here than it was with that game?
This dores happens. Choices of Romance and Midssumer Nights have MC that, in my opinion, don’t feel like male. Especially the MC from Choices of Romance and the brother infamous lime “we are having tea like proper ladies”.
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In my opinion realism shouldn’t be used to prevent someone from seeing themselves in media, especially someone of a minority group. It’s not worth it to me if it makes someone feel bad.
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I have never argued for realism. (I think it is a garbage argument.) But you can’t take an author who does one thing and an author who does another and compare it.
I do think that there are too many hosted genderlocked to male. I just don’t think that has anything to with Russian saga, since that was not genderlocked.
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I have, personally, always found the whole “I just can’t write a character of a different gender!” argument a little silly.
There is little that truly separates men, women, and nonbinary people. The difference between someone who identifies as a man and someone who identifies as a woman can be minute compared to the difference between two men or two women, as the real variation in humans comes not from one’s gender but from one’s individual self. No two women are the same, just as no two men or two nonbinary people are the same.
Saying you cannot write someone of a different gender than yourself is like saying you cannot write any character beyond one you yourself closely identify with. If a writer is capable of writing a cast of characters that each have their own personality, said writer should be equally capable of writing characters of different genders with the same amount of variety. If they cannot, if they can only write characters of one gender, well… The issue goes beyond writing.
To be less vague and get more into the actual issue, in many cases male writers who poorly write female character have trouble seeing women as complex human beings. They know, consciously or not, the stereotypes they’ve been exposed to, and they struggle to break free of that pattern of thinking. They write women who are mere archetypes and little else, but that is really all that female character needs to be for their plot as it revolves almost entirely around male charactes — who may also be lacking in development beyond some archetypal ideal.
Then, digging a bit more into a societal issue, women are often portrayed as capricious creatures whose moods change at the drop of a hat and never say what they mean — i.e. “I’m fine.” They’re made out to be enigmatic puzzles that men have to crack — “What does she really mean when she says ‘no’?” Thus there’s this idea that it’s hard to understand how the minds of women work because they’re so “different” to men. (Spoiler: they’re not.) This makes male writers view writing women, especially from the POV of a woman, difficult. They approach the task with greater apprehension and then rely on archetypes to help fill in the blanks.
It’s silly to me because if they approached writing their female characters the same way they do their male characters, they’re likely going to have a better character and have an easier job writing her.
That’s really the secret to writing characters that aren’t the same gender as you. Approach them as you would a character of your gender (or whatever gender you’re most comfortable writing). Develop them by the same process as your other characters. Mention a gender-specific outfit or physical characteristic at some point when you introduce them. Then write them as you do your other characters.
It works because most characters — most people — their entire identity isn’t defined by their gender. There should be a lot more to your character than their gender. It should mean about as much as, say, their eye color. Sometimes a character’s eye color is a big part of the story, sometimes it’s something that is barely worth mentioning.
Yikes, I went off on a tangent. Sorry. 
I’m very tired, so there may be errors, but I think I made the point I wanted to?
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