#specially to play characters also out of the binary that have the same/similar pronouns and presentation etc... this is so comprehensible?!

[adamnablelittledevil]

I don't see Emma D'Arcy playing Gabrielle because they're too young and on HOTD already, I don't think the schedules would work. Still, they're actually a great actor and one of the few non-binary performers we have AND Gabrielle is a gender nonconforming character, so this is one of the few fancasts of 30yos that have some logic? Yeah, it's not realistic, it will probably never happen and it's okay, but there's nothing crazy in wanting a talented non-binary actor playing a good gnc character.

[almaasi]

reaction post typed while watching SPN 14x14 “Ouroboros”

conclusion: yes, apparently feet can look gay, and Dean and Cas are both queer by proxy

04:35pm

me: still v magnesium deficient, sick, dizzy

LET’S WATCH A THING AND THINK ABOUT IT WITH MY PUDDING BRAIN

any thoughts stated here are run through a pudding filter so please do not be alarmed if they are incoherent or a weird colour

okay it’s a Steve Yockey episode so i guess he’s gonna give us a great character and then kill them before the title card

-

04:41

hang on i need to eat and i can’t eat and think at the same time so i’mma go watch an episode of shaun the sheep brb

-

04:46

okay well i watched half an episode and ate half my food so,... yay

LET’S WATCH THIS OTHER THING THEN

-

04:48

sam’s “i believe in us” *PUNCH* still makes me laugh

-

04:49

the body on the AAAAAAAAAAAAA I’

M SCREAMING NOPE NOPE NOPE

-

can i just watch this whole thing with my hand over the screen

because that is what i’ doing rn

oh god i hate this

-

actually you know what

i just skipped to the title card

cause fuck that haahahhaah nope

-

oh lord it didn’t skip to team free will

how much of this do i have to take

-

oh okay tfw are here already

WELL GREAT NOW I HAVE TO FIGURE OUT WHERE TO SKIP BACK TO

ASJFSDFHSFHSJ

-

04:54

i fuckin love rowena and how much they ask for her help even though they’re “enemies” except they’re clearly lowkey Fond of each other

also i like how this ep started in the middle of the case

-

04:56

rowena: “hello castiel” ;) ;) ;)

okay well

this pleases me

because i know the only way this ends is that cas is not interested and that’s the Point

because he <3s dean

but also why the hell is rowena into cas....... surely she knows he loves dean. unless she’s just into starting shit, i wouldn’t be surprised

-

04:58

the way jack says “i’m not dying”

10/10

-

04:59

cas: “he’s now claimed the lives of six people in northern new mexico”

why does he say “people” like that

-

05:01

dean’s throwing a looooot of salt at rowna. maybe because she keeps flirting with cas

-

“everything means something”

YEAH EXACTLY

DEAN’S SALTY BECAUSE ROWENA’S FLIRTING WITH CAS I’VE DECIDED

-

05:03

sam says dean can keep michael locked in his head “because he’s dean and dean is dean”

yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah okay

expert closet curator, you mean

-

05:05

dean has a good feeling about bringing rowena in on this one??????????????? after all the snark????????????

cas: “they do have many books”

me: *squINTS REALLY HARD* i feel like they’re implying something else and neither of them are talking about the same thing. did dean set sam up on a date with rowena????????????

also?

DEAN AND CAS ARE ON A DATE. DEAN AND CAS ARE ON A DINNER DATE IN A DINER. ALERT ALERT ALERT

paralleling rowena and sam perhaps

-

05:08

concerned head tilt

oh god their love and mutual understanding and trust in each other is killing me with its softness

i’m so so so glad we get to see them in some downtime at fucking last

-

05:10

oh no jack’s coughing again

why can’t he have nice things

-

05:10

dean: “that’s what i’m supposed to say, right? i’m fine? keep on moving?”

cas: “no, dean”

the fact dean lets his guard down only with cas in private ;~;

-

sidenote, this episode is giving me my bloody valentine meets hunteri heroici vibes, which is nice because they’re two of my all-time fave episodes

but god i wish it would go easy on the cannibalism

-

05:14

dean: “i’m barely even sleeping” :D

THAT PAINED GRIN OH GOD

but also

i’m so emotional because he told anyone at all, but especially that of all people he told cas

of course he told cas, cas is his emotional sounding board

if this were a fanfic cas would offer to share the bed with dean and help him sleep

....but i mean, who knows, maybe dean was secretly hoping for that anyway

-

05:19

that’s the face of “dean doesn’t know what liturgical means”

-

05:22

jack: “what’s an av club?”

cas: “it’s a special club for people who do not play sports”

dean: *points at cas* “him. he’s av club”

mmmmmmmm yup

autistic nerd

dean’s baseball and track team, cas is av club and student tutoring

but also if dean ever got cas onto the baseball field cas would hit every ball first time

and dean would be swooning

BUT ALSO DEAN WOULD FUCKING LOVE AV CLUB ARE YOU KIDDING ME

he’d be in there with charlie every fuckin day and leaning seductively on furniture while cas does his nerd thing, until the point where something properly capures dean’s interest and then HE WANTS A GO and bats away everyone else’s hands and hogs the contraption for 3 hours. also he’d fix things when they break

DEAN TONE DOWN THE PROJECTION A NOTCH WOULD YA

JEEZ

look i’m just gonna count dean calling cas “av club” as flirting, because hello yes there is no way dean doesn’t find that interesting

-

05:30

i fucking knew it

the moment this episode opened and i saw the guy’s bare feet in the kitchen somehow i knew he was queer ??????????

like

i can’t explain it

but the fact there was a shot of his feet and his feet looked gay i can’t even

anyway this probably doesn’t even count as legit queer rep given he’s seducing guys and killing them so

stupid gay feet

sidenote: did ANYONE else get queer vibes from that opening scene? CAN PEOPLE’S FEET LOOK GAY OR IS THAT JUST ME

maybe it’s like... the sensuality of bare feet + cooking, breaking pointless gender roles n stuff, my brain has been coded by society’s bullshit to perceive sensual men as non-heterosexual

idk

but also. the foot-upward view of a new character... male gaze, right? and seeing the male gaze on a male character makes it queer

goddamn

it’s a thing

it’s a thing and the directing got the point across and it took me until now to work it out

GAY FEET

-

also

now i’m going back to cas’ line “six people”

my initial understanding of that line was that they weren’t all men

but the thing was the people didn’t need to be said that way if it was just men and women

my immediate instinct said the victims were non-binary, but i didn’t type it because i had no reason yet to believe that might be true and it seemed unnecessary to say it

but at this point, as the baddie hits on a guy at a truck stop in exchange for a ride, they’re clearly potentially queer victims

so

yeah that explains the inflection

-

05:41

on the one hand, i’m seeing a connection to that time dean was seduced by a siren

but see my problem with this is that the guy’s either gonna end up dead or saved and i don’t know which yet

i just want happy queer stories

so i’m pretty divided about this

but on the other hand, please, god, let this gorgon guy “sense things” about dean

ALSO WAIT

IS THIS THE FIRST GAY KISS ON THIS SHOW?????????? 90% SURE THIS THE FIRST GAY KISS. there might have been a background one once

PROGRESS HAS BEEN MADE

EVEN IF IT’S EVIL AND TWISTED AND MAKES ME FEEL WEIRD

-

05:44

i feel like there should’ve been an optic nerve attached to that eyeball.. and a lot of gross stuff

but also thank goodness there wasn’t

ohdfjfdg i really hate this

but also i’m smiling?

-

05:46

cas: “is this amusing to you?”

the guy called him sir!!! eeheheh

-

05:47

cas: “you’re not standing alone, why doesn’t he mention me?”

dean: “maybe you’re not his type”

i mean. guess he can’t see angels. BUT ALSO

CAN WE UNPACK HOW UTTERLY QUEER EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS IS

WE NOW UNDERSTAND THAT NOAH’S TYPE IS QUEER GUYS

AND DEAN KNOWS THIS

SO BY SAYING CAS ISN’T NOAH’S TYPE THAT MEANS HE’S IMPLYING THAT HE HIMSELF IS

BECAUSE HE’S QUEER AF

steve yockey, this is the episode i was waiting to see from you

team free will working a case together, dean and cas on a date talking about their feelings, on a case about queer stuff

hell fucking yes

-

05:52

rowena: “need anti-venom in case one of you boys gets sloppy”

wouldn’t that mean noah kisses either cas or jack

god i’m so glad rowena’s there too

this episode is great sdgsfkg

-

05:53

ROWENA AND SAM FAKING A RELATIONSHIP + A DOG OH MRJGJD IFUCKING LOVE THIS

WHERE DID THEY GET THE DOG

WHERE’S THE BIT LATER WHERE DEAN AND CAS ~FAKE~ A RELATIONSHIP PLEASE

-

05:55

OH MY GOD THE VET STUCK A THERMOMETER IN JACK’S ASS

OH MY GOFH D:

-

06:00

noah: “then he doesn’t have to die like all the other men”

hmmmmmmm

okay so all the victims were men

which makes me even more curious about why cas used that inflection on “people”

cas also looked like of amused? definitely a misha expression rather than a cas expression, the little lilt of a smile on his lips like the way he says any word starting with “h”

maybe some of them were transgender men and cas didn’t know them before they died so could only guess as to their gender? maybe some of the bodies they found were not gender-conforming

it also kiiiiind of sounded like misha changing the script after a discussion on set about it

but if that were true then that means someone on set doesn’t believe gay or queer men are men? maybe? maybe i’m reaching there

but i’m genuinely caught up on that inflection and the use of that word, it really stood out to me

and it stands out especially, now, because like i said, we know the victims were men, we know team free will found them all, and we know they were queer.

but also it’s not dean saying it, it’s cas

and i can’t imagine any scenario where cas would have trouble with non-binary pronouns

if anyone has further thoughts on this, please direct me towards them

-

06:23

my browser broke?? and i lost a chunk of this post, but i had the above stuff backed up in email

i'mma go back a bit and try and remember what i typed

-

idk i think it was just about the fact noah confirmed all his victims were men which further confused me

and then said he also eats ladies

and then said some feminist stuff which made me sad that it came from the bad guy

but also that i could imagine cas saying something similar, deadpan, and then reaching for dean’s burger

-

* schmooch *

whEN DOES DEAN GET TO DO THAT

-

06:28

okay YES

I KNOW WHAT I WANT TO SAY

NOAH SAYS HELLO TO DEAN

WHY JUST DEAN

WHY IS HE FIXATED ON DEAN WHEN THERE’S 3 OTHER PEOPLE IN THE ROOM? and why only write the letter to dean?

I’LL TELL YOU WHY

BECAUSE DEAN’S BISEXUAL AF

AND YES HE IS HIS TYPE

REPRESSED “STRAIGHT” MEN WHO SECRETLY LIKE GUYS

CAN THAT BE ANY MORE OBVIOUS?? I THINK NOT

i love how this episode refers back to some of the older episodes, in the best possible way

conclusion: dean is bi

-

06:32

noah took the bag with the snek inside but i guess the snek esckep

-

06:34

maybe true love’s kiss will wake dean up

CAS QUICK

MIGHT AS WELL TRY RIGHT

-

06:40

hurts my heart how cas has apparently made peace with the fact he’ll outlive dean and sam

i guess it’s good but

can’t help but believe deep down he would rather die than live without them

-

and now i’m crying because cas says the point is that you got to know them at all

suddenly catharsis for future pain

-

06:47

oh NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MAGGIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

D:

THIS IS THE WORST

-

06:47

rowena as michael??? okay, that i can get behind

ooh

BUT ALSO

OH NO

-

06:49

michael (about dean): “it didn’t work out. it was him. not me.”

flip of a classic dating line, making this QUEER AGAIN

-

06:55

JACK THE LIL HERO

WHAT DID YOU DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

//waits for the silence to be over

-

06:56

oh boy

-

06:57

OKAY WOW

WHAT AN EPISODE

i was really hoping it would turn into a plotty one, the way changing channels does at the end

this was really well done and i enjoyed it a lot!!!!!!!!! i mean, besides the squicks, and the fact the queer rep and feminist lines came from a bad guy

dean was 100% noah’s type

jack is the bestest baby bean

i feel so bad about the thermometer thing..... like, i’m not sure if it was meant to come across as funny? but there was no indication it should be... which is good i guess? but also i feel secondhand violated

DEAN AND CAS’ DATE AND TALKING ABOUT FEELINGS WHEEE

i like that this episode actually came full circle on that “dean vs michael” point, rather than having it be a one-off conversation and things aren’t resolved until a later episode

i think i’m gonna enjoy rowena as michael. and i like that she said yes because she does care about team free will

sad about maggie :c

but also all those other extra hunters were changed out pretty much episode so there was no real way to know who they were. they seemed pretty diverse though, across various episodes

i liked the asian lady vet!!!! she was fun. and i’m glad the asian gay guy didn’t die... where did he even disappear to though? who knows

overall 10/10? it had all the good shit i like so. yep.

I WANT MORE EPISODE LIKE THIS. QUEER CHARACTERS (PREFERABLY NOT EVIL), MORE ASIAN CHARACTERS, MORE TEAM FREE WILL ON HUNTS, MORE LADIES GETTING COOL ROLES AS PART OF THE TEAM AND/OR AS AN FRENEMY, MORE JACK SAVING THE DAY

MORE ROWENA IN PANTS

yeah

but more of all

MORE GAY KISSES FOR DEAN AND CAS

i love that the fact noah was fixated on dean put him in the “noah’s type = queer” category, and when noah kissed cas it did the same thing

so really, by evil proxy, noah made a point of showing us who’s queer

i mean we already knew

but HE SHOWED US

yee

-

no conclusion on why cas said p e o p l e though

[mrgsaplit-blog]

Looking at the World Through Open Essay Prompts, 40 Minutes at a Time.

“Novels and plays often include scenes of weddings, funerals, parties, and other social occasions. Such scenes may reveal the values of the characters and the society in which they live. Select a novel or play that includes such a scene and, in a focused essay, discuss the contribution the scene makes to the meaning of the work as a whole. You may choose a work from the list below or another novel or play of literary merit.” - Free Response Prompt, 1997.

The phenomenon of gender reveal parties snuck up on me, and to be honest I’m still a little in shock. One year I’d never heard of them, and the by the next I was so sick of them that each new one was a blue-pink smudge on humanity itself. We’re at a strange juncture in history: becoming more enlightened about what gender means while at the same time manufacturing an event out of discovering the baby’s biological sex and promptly sharing it to social media. To understand how we got here, one must understand the values of the characters embracing the reveal and the public nature of its function in society.

In case you are not familiar with them, gender reveal parties must do two things very well. First, they tell everyone you are pregnant. In this day and age, you can never be too careful about asking a woman if she is pregnant, so it’s nice to finally exhale and know that, indeed, the person you might have suspected of being pregnant is, in fact, pregnant. They also build suspense in the form of drama, surprise, explosions or similar special effects. The more complicated and potentially lethal, the better. Think “arrow shot at a balloon that explodes pink confetti,” not “open a pizza box see BOY spelled out in olives.”

The fulcrum on which this suspense hinges is a biological fact that is not “gender” at all, but “sex.” And what a poignant time in history to be doubling down on the misnomer, even as the air  swirls with words like fluidity, what’s your pronoun, non-binary and identifying. Biological sex is different from the cultural and societal construct of gender, making elaborate celebrations of gender seem a little… forced on the avocado-sized fetus just trying survive in there. Much of middle America can shrug off concerns about newfangled gender concepts and just embrace the gender reveal with an enthusiasm unencumbered by political correctness or even accuracy, it is with an equal amount of hand-wringing that feminists and progressives have likely wanted to have a gender reveal and then thought twice about it. It is this exact conundrum - a push/pull of attraction and then discretion - that is at the root of our angst today as modern people, and even the duality of mankind, itself. Because who doesn’t like a reason to party?

Lastly, a look at the medium through which the gender reveal is shared, and we see that the medium is part of the message. The proclamation (We’re having a... whatever!) is the main act, but the affirmation of friendship via comments and likes binds the social group together as much as the pink icing inside the cake or the blue balloons waiting above the ceiling tiles. It’s important to remember, too, that the ringleader of the whole thing is oblivious to the whole circus, as focused on personal growth as we all should be. 

[queenieofaces]

Some reflections on writing ace and aro LARP characters

This post has been cross-posted to The Asexual Agenda.

As some of you may remember, I played New World Magischola (a Live Action Role Playing game set at a wizard college) last year.  Since then, I’ve played a couple of other LARPs (including the second semester of NWM).  At some point in the past year my friend @algebraicbubbles and I started tossing around the idea of writing our own LARP.*  Our concept was simple: we’re both queer kids who love superhero fiction and often read superpower narratives as metaphors for queerness, so we wanted to write a superhero high school game (think Sky High in terms of aesthetic) that had queerness front and center.  We jokingly called the game Superqueeroes because we both love terrible puns, and then we couldn’t think of a better name so it stuck.

Anyway, one thing led to another, we recruited another friend to our team, and then we wrote and ran the game this past summer.  (If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, well, I was writing 11 character sheets, a world doc, and a whole lot of plot.)

This is less of a post about LARP and more a reflection on the process of writing ace and aro LARP characters, and how that’s different from (or similar to) writing ace characters in fiction.  My hope is that this post will still be interesting to you even if you know nothing about LARP, and will be interesting to LARPers who aren’t that well-versed in asexuality or aromanticism.

Note: I’ve avoided plot spoilers in this post, but I necessarily have to talk about some character backstories.  If you’re planning on playing Superqueeroes and would prefer to go in without any knowledge, it’s probably best to skip over this post.

In order to understand what the heck I’m going on about in this post, it’s probably necessary to give some background on the game.  The premise is that the characters (there are 17 of them) are all seniors at a high school for kids with superpowers.  The game takes place during graduation, when all the characters get to find out which superhero team they’ll be placed on after graduation, announce their new superhero name, and take their first steps into adulthood.  (Needless to say, graduation doesn’t go entirely as planned, but what exactly happens is a spoiler, so you’ll have to play if you want to find out.)  Some questions the players get to explore include: What does it mean to be a hero?  How far would you go to achieve your goals?  Who are you and who do you want to be?  What kinds of relationships do you want to have and with whom?  Who matters in your life, and how far would you go to keep them safe?  Needless to say, it’s a game that’s really heavily about identity and relationships (of all kinds) in addition to being about having sweet superpowers and saving the day.  It’s also worth noting that nobody has alignments, per se--anyway can become a supervillain if they so desire, or could become the greatest hero ever known.  The path of the character is decided not only by their backstory and the game plot but also by their player and the relationships they choose to focus on.  (For example, there’s a character who we expected to be played as a sweet, friendly social butterfly, who wound up being played as an incredibly socially savvy, kind of manipulative mastermind...which was 100% in line with what was written on the character sheet, even though we weren’t expecting that outcome.)

We decided early on that we wanted to have characters with a variety of genders and sexualities written explicitly into their character sheets.  Some characters have their gender/sexuality explicitly defined (e.g.��“you are bisexual” or “you are non-binary”), some have a list of other characters they’re crushing on (and the player can interpret how they identify in whatever way they like), and some were left undefined so the player could decide what felt best to them (although the understanding is, other than The Token Straight TM, every character is some flavor of queer).  Some characters are dating other characters, some are hoping to date other characters, some are trying to figure out how to resolve the love quandrangle they’re stuck in,** and some are really tired of all the high school romantic drama.  Non-normative genders, sexualities, and relationship structures are not that big of a deal in the Superqueeroes universe--nobody is going to face violence or backlash by coming out,*** although of course people can still be nervous about coming out or unsure if coming out is a good idea.  Even without the possibility of negative consequences, disclosing part of yourself can be really scary and cause complications in your personal life.  Again, some characters are explicitly out, some are explicitly closeted, and some are left up to the player to decide what feels best.

There is one explicitly ace character and one explicitly aro character in the game (although there are a couple of additional characters who could easily be played as ace or aro spectrum if their players so desired).  I wrote both of them--in fact, I wrote a total of 11 of the 17 characters (and looked over/edited the other 6, while the other writer did the same for me).  For the sake of this post, I’m going to refer to the ace character as G and the aro character as M.  Most of the characters are written to be gender-neutral, and then we assign them genders and pronouns based on player preference--in run 1 of the game, for example, G was female and M was genderfluid.  For simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to both characters with “they/them” pronouns in this post. 

One of the first challenges was that we wanted to keep our character sheets fairly short--I think almost all of them are in the 2-3 page range.  We kept them concise to prevent people from having to memorize a boatload of information (it’s only a 4-hour game after all), and also to give people leeway to interpret characters as they saw fit. Our character sheets generally include information on the character’s family, power, gender and/or sexuality (although there were some we left up to the players as already mentioned), any past experiences that might be relevant (history of being bullied, for example, or a mysterious encounter with a superhero in their youth), their hopes for the future/general life philosophy, other characters they have relationships with (friends, rivals, siblings, study buddies, etc.), and a list of two or three possible goals for the character.  As you can probably guess, that’s a whole lot of information to pack into a very small space, which meant that we could usually devote no more than a paragraph or two to a character’s gender and sexuality.

This, needless to say, made writing character sheets for the aro and ace characters hard.  While in a work of fiction you might be able to really delve into a character’s backstory and motivations and flesh them out as a whole person, in a 2-3 page character sheet all you can do is gesture at a rough sketch and hope that the player can fill everything else in themselves.  And while there are a lot of short-hand gestures that I can make to aro and ace experiences that I would expect aro and ace players to pick up on, I had no guarantee that the player we cast would be aro/ace or, in fact, have any knowledge of asexuality or aromanticism.  So I had to come up with a really compact way to gesture to ace and aro experiences without creating a character that would be easily reducible to stereotypes.

First, I didn’t want either character to be defined solely by absence.  There has been a lot of discussion about positive vs. negative definitions of asexuality over the years, and while I don’t object to negative definitions of asexuality in general, it was important (especially since I didn’t know who would be playing the characters) to define the characters not only by what they didn’t want but also by what they did want.  M, for example, grew up with a huge extended family, and has always wanted that for themself, but knows that they don’t want a romantic partner, which makes the standard path to a big family tricky.  G is an empath (which is how they figured out that they’re asexual), and sometimes has trouble understanding their peers’ romantic drama, not because they lack empathy (ha, puns) but because they don’t understand why people can’t just talk to each other and stop pining from afar.  They have a classmate who they know is attracted to them, and they get to decide how they want to deal with that--do they want to take their own advice and hash it out with them or just keep avoiding them?  M and G are both in situations that are directly linked to their orientations, but require more complex solutions than just saying, “Do not want.”

Second, I didn’t want either character to have no powers or a “late-bloomer” narrative.  There are a couple of characters who have no powers at all, including one who is the child of two of the most famous heroes and who everyone is expecting to develop powers any day now.  While having no powers seems like a really obvious metaphor for ace and aro experience, I didn’t want powerless ace and aro characters, especially if there was any chance that they were “late-bloomers,” since that would cast asexuality/aromanticism in a really negative light (it’s not just an absence--it’s an absence of what makes everyone else in the game special, yikes).****  Instead, both G and M have consistently undervalued powers, and a good chunk of their plot is trying to get people to take them seriously (also, arguably, an ace/aro experience, but one that’s a lot less value-laden than making them powerless).

Third, I didn’t want either character to be isolated or be a lone wolf.  Especially in a game that’s so heavy on romance plotlines, the most stereotypical writing choice would have been to have G and M be the two characters uninvolved in romance plotlines.  (There's a lot of commentary to be made here about the ways that aromanticism and asexuality are often equated, but that's a whole separate post in and of itself.)  The second easiest choice would be to substitute very strong friendships for G and M’s romance plots.  What I wound up doing instead was making very strong friendships normal for pretty much all the characters--most characters have at least one positive relationship (like a friend or a mentor) and one antagonistic relationship (although some characters have more of one or the other).  M has no romance plotlines and G has a potential romance plotline they can pursue if their player wants to play them as romantically-inclined, but there are other non-ace non-aro characters who don’t have romance plotlines--there’s a bisexual character who thinks dating is way too much trouble, for example.  Both G and M have figuring out what kinds of relationships they want in their life listed as one of their goals...but they’re not the only ones with that goal.  They also both have very strong relationships with their families--M, as already mentioned, has a huge extended family and is in close contact with their siblings, while G has two university professor dads who would really prefer that they go to college rather than becoming a superhero straight out of high school.  Basically, in a game about relationships and queerness, I didn’t want to paint M and G’s relationship desires as uniquely weird, and didn’t want to make romance a foregone conclusion for every other character.

Fourth, I wanted to avoid stereotypes about aromantic and asexual people--especially stereotypes about them being heartless, emotionless, robotic, alien, innocent/naive, etc.*****  G directly counters a lot of ace stereotypes--they’re really emotionally fluent and not naive by any means.  M is aromantic but cares about people really deeply and is far from emotionless (some might say that they have too many emotions).  There is a cyborg character in the game, but it’s not either of them.  I also wanted to avoid a lot of the “insufficient aro/ace” tropes that can appear in fiction--in a game where queerness is accepted and celebrated, I didn’t want either of the characters to be saddled with a plot where their orientation was “hurting” (or perceived to be hurting) someone else (as I have unfortunately seen happen in other games with ace characters).

I think I managed okay at all my goals--our first run, at least, suggests that I did.  G and M were both fully fleshed out characters rather than collections of stereotypes.  In the end, they became a superpowered duo (called “Emotional Assault” and “Battery”; yes, I have been crying about that truly awful pun for months) and also decided that once they got older, they were going to adopt kids together.  They also schemed with some other students, brainwashed their principal, and helped a supervillain escape justice, but, you know, nobody’s perfect.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens when we run the game again--we were very careful about who we picked for our first run and how we cast, but if we run the game at a convention, for example, we’re going to have a lot less control over our player base.  Even with our carefully curated group of players, we had a lot of trouble casting M in particular, in large part because not many people said they were comfortable playing an aromantic character.  (Talking to players afterward, it seems like that was mainly because A. people wanted romance plots or B. they weren’t sure that they could accurately and sensitively portray an aromantic character.  We had similar difficulty casting one of the trans characters.)

I think the big takeaway here is that writing ace and aro characters for LARP (especially if you’re going for compact character sheets) is pretty different than writing them in fiction.  The space constraints are very different, and you ultimately don’t have control over the character--all you can really do is point the player in the right direction and hope that they follow your signposting.  But the upside is that since character creation is collaborative, the players can take your characters in completely unexpected but delightful directions.

If you want to learn more about Superqueeroes, I have a whole tag for it on my other blog, which, granted, is mostly all caps text posts about how bad I am at naming things as well as some beautiful mood boards made by one of our run 1 players.  There will almost certainly be future runs of the game, so keep an eye out for announcements about that if you’re hanging around New England LARP communities.

*For those of you wondering what a LARP is, there are a whole bunch of different styles, but in our case we were running a four-hour low-mechanics theatre game, so imagine doing improv theatre for four hours.  Alternatively, imagine the games you might have played with your friends on the playground where you pretended to be ninjas or pirates or wizards.  Basically, we got everyone together in a room and pretended to be superpowered teenagers for four hours.  The three writers played NPCs, so I got to be the slightly douche-y, America-themed principal.  It was good.

**I was very proud of the run 1 players for resolving the love quadrangle by all dating each other.  Good job, kids.

***Although there are definitely LARPs that deal with heavy themes around gender and sexuality really well, we more or less wanted escapist fiction.  We let people decide how dramatic they wanted to make being queer for their character--for some people it was really not a big deal at all, whereas for others it was a really central part of their identity.  (Multiple characters wound up picking superhero names that were puns about their orientations, for example.)  But removing the possibility of violence or negative backlash from the picture meant that people could pursue their love quadrangles or figure out how to tell their friends that they were non-binary without having to worry about whether they’d be fired or disowned or ostracized.

****There’s some good commentary from the author of The Wicked + The Divine about similar choices they made with regards to asexuality in their cast.  (Major spoilers for WicDiv at the link, of course.)

*****Hey, have you read the Ace Tropes series yet?  If not, you should do that!  It’s really good!