@Cupcake said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:
So my notion is, if you are self-assessing your capacity to portray another gender or sexual orientation, if you decide that you don't think you can do so because you genuinely don't feel you can grasp the nature of that gender/orientation and you would come off as a caricature (which for obvious reasons you wouldn't want to do), does that make you mindful of your own limitations, or limiting yourself in an unnecessary fashion?
@Ghost said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:
I dig this philosophical approach. I dig the questions.
My own 2 cents on this is that anytime you are writing a character whose perspective is different from your own real-life perspective you're going to get a few things wrong. In good faith is a useful term, here. Is it an attempt in good faith or meant to be a caricature? The only way to know for sure is to ask the player, because assumptions can be (and often are) assumed to be negative until proven otherwise. Plenty of stories in this thread show that.
I agree with @Ghost. I think these are very interesting questions. I also agree that in good faith is incredibly important here. Do I get things wrong when I play a female character or a person of color or a homosexual male character or a veteran or any of the other things that I am not? Probably. Hell, I'll even say certainly.
But I can assure you that it's a good faith effort on my part, and I think that there's no reason that someone shouldn't be able to make a good faith effort to play a character type that they aren't. On the other side of that, if you want to play what you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with that (unless you're playing a self-insert -- I might have a little shade to throw on those who play direct self-inserts).
I don't think that those who play characters whose gender/sexuality/political beliefs/etc are the same as their own are lesser roleplayers -- in my own case I might even suggest that I probably play a cis het white male character better than another type of character simply because I understand how society views them and have a baseline to connect with. I think this latter point is an incredibly important one, and why I always try to have something in common with my characters. Maybe they like a different gender than I do, have different color skin than I do, and have wildly different life experience than I do, but maybe they like Star Wars and hate coffee, like me. It's those little touches that connect me to the characters I play and allow me to explore differences I might have with them (be they gender, sexuality, politics, etc).
For the record, most of my characters are cis/het men, although I've played homosexual men, demi-sexual women, asexual men, heterosexual women, bisexual women, and a variety of other combinations, and I tend to play a lot of POC.