#Fairgold is REALLY fucking queer

[hazel2468]

They are in LOVE, Your Honor!

They're BISEXUAL DISASTERS, Your Honor!

They're T4T, Your Honor!!!!!

[hazel2468]

ALRIGHT jumping in to talk about gender and sexuality in my little fucking universe because all of this is SUPER cool, and because my wife and I worked really hard to ensure that the world we made (initially for a homebrew DnD campaign and now just a whole setting of its own) was enticing for our VERY queer group of friends, but also had some fucking ISSUES.

How sexuality and gender is handled ENTIRELY depends. On where you go. For example- in Avalon, which is a nation almost entirely supported by the VERY mixed city of Fairgold, they're pretty damn chill about sexuality and gender. Love who you want, be who you want. The entire philosophy that Fairgold was constructed on after the Cataclysm destroyed... almost everything (some 50,000 years ago don't worry about it) was the freedom to have a future and make your mark. Being not-straight and not-cis, as we understand those words (we don't really HAVE terms like "trans" and "bi" or "gay" in Avalonian, as these are just... Things that you are and that doesn't matter what DOES matter is are you making money?) is just considered NORMAL there. Fairgold is the place in Urae with the LEAST social restrictions on behavior, and it is a melting pot of people from all over not just the continent, but the known world. The closest we get to modern gendered concepts is in rural parts of Avalon, outside of Fairgold, where life is mostly farming and hunting, and we see mothers staying home with and raising their children and fathers going out and hunting. Aretea is a bit different. There is a MASSIVE emphasis on bloodlines, relation to royalty and the past, and social responsibility. A lot of the rules there apply MUCH less to the lower classes. No one cares if you're for example, a gay cis man who marries another gay cis man: if you decide you don't want your bloodline to continue? Eh. You're poor. Who cares. But among the nobility it is an ENTIRELY different issues. Aretean nobles are EXPECTED to reproduce biologically within marriages that are arranged by their families. It is a MUST. Now, there is some room for things like, say. A transgender man and a cis man being wed- provided that the trans man is willing and able to bear children "the old fashioned way" (without magical interference). There is also the unspoken rule of "arrangements" for people in marriages they would rather not be in. Having a lover (or several) on the side is all well and good, and many couples agree that, outside of their duties to produce heirs, they will see and be intimate with others. But it ALL must be kept very hush-hush. The principle of the matter. Even if people know you're doing that, they cannot KNOW, out loud, acknowledged publicly. This isn't even TOUCHING the bullshit that is Xandris, where sexuality and gender are not only completely outside of what we, in the real world, as humans think about as gender (Xandris is UNDERWATER and a lot of aquatic species can, and do, just... Change their biological sex!), but everything depends on SOCIAL CLASS! There are genders that ONLY people of a high enough class are ALLOWED to have! There is an entire gender of "Outcast" (lovingly joked about as "I identify as a fucking problem"- our first Barbarian was a Naga from Xandris who was technically trans, as he found that he related much better to the surface concept of "man" as opposed to his Xandrian gender).

There are a lot of other places to talk about, but the gist of it is that not only is everything varied. But there also wouldn't BE terms like "lesbian" or "gay" or "trans" in most places, at least not how we understand them. A big part of the world is that the Cataclysm destroyed the world before, and most of what Urae is BUILT on has been lost to history, quite literally destroyed. You may find derogatory terms and discrimination related to sexuality and gender: for example, in Xandris there are some genders that are "low class" that are considered insulting to be assigned. In Aretea, should a noble choose a relationship that cannot result in biological children, there are plenty of nasty things to be said, in addition to extreme social punishment- up to and including total loss of social status.

I love that the world we built is so queer.

I also love that we built this world and it is STILL. So supremely fucked up. None of this is touching on all of the really REALLY dark shit that happens in some places.

All the cultural relativism going away in a person's worldbuilding once they get to sexuality & gender