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Old 07-28-2004, 02:05 PM   #6
Cyre
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Join Date: Jul 2004
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The opposite gender is potentially the most difficult concept to roleplay effectively simply because our experiences tend not to align themselves with any true depth of understanding. Males playing females will generally do either one of two things. First, they will simply play their character as though they were a male regardless. They make little to no effort to make their gender RP a prominent part of their character simply because it doesn't usually matter to them. They play as a female for benefits other than the RP, such as gaining access to gender-restricted guilds or, and this is the exception to their lack of RP, to gain more attention from the numerous testosterone-charged males willing and eager to play knight in shining armor.

Second, they will pick an extremely specific model of a female and emulate it to a T. Generally, this model is based more on their own fantasies than on any real world comparison. The character, as previously noted, usually has extensively described physical traits that border on the impossibly beautiful, and the character is usually portrayed as vulnerable and open to suggestion. This again mirrors the male player's fantasy of the perfect female, who takes little to no effort to seduce and is willing and ready to perform whatever function is desired. The character is generally not played out to such an extent where intense sexual experiences become part and parcel to the character's existence, excepting for those individuals previously noted who desire further benefits from their character's gender role than simply the rewarding RP.

That being said, it has been my experience that those males who succesfully play deep female characters end up having extremely good times and often gain a lot of respect in their communities. Whether this is  a reflection of some deeper attempt to unify the yin and yang of masculinity and femininity or if it is simply more noted because of the general rarity, I am hard pressed to say.

The more seldomly occuring case of females playing males usually follows much of the same logic. They extrapolate a character from a small set of generic personality traits that they have had experience with in the males they have known. Females are often able to roleplay a male easier than males are able to roleplay a female, and this is as easily attributed to the fact that there are more male hero archetypes available than female heroine archetypes in common myth and media as it is to the fact that, for fear of incriminating my own gender, females tend on the whole to recognize and emulate behavior more readily.

Edit: Not necessarily more seldomly occuring, I suppose, just more seldom in so far as the cases I am aware of are concerned.


~Cyre
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