thread: 2006-04-10 : I roleplay like a little sexually-irrelevent nerd
On 2006-04-10, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Yes!
Instead of trying so hard to please my peers that they despised me, I actually tended to go out of my way to preemptively annoy my peers so they'd despise me for that instead of all the other stuff, but, basically, yeah, that was me, too. And to this day I still boggle when something/someone—say, my wife & child—confronts me with the fact that, hey, I'm a man now! ("Really?" goes the 14-year-old entrenched in the back of my head. "What does that even mean?")
Now, here is the strange, glorious, possibly fucked-up thing:
When I roleplay male characters, they tend to be cold, controlling, and repressed; at best they have mild martyr complexes, at worst they want everybody else to be a martyr, too. They are not people you'd want to meet and, often, not people I really enjoy pretending to be.
But when I roleplay female characters, they are passionate, intense, and expressive; at worst they self-destruct spectacularly, at best they ride through hell towards the possibility of redemption—and, just in the my last two years of play, towards the possibility of forgiving themselves.
So: I "roleplay like a man" by roleplaying a woman. Go figure.
This makes SF go "As for being "reasonably sexy"..."
My male alter-egos never are; the females tend to be, but they never do much with it, and in fact for a while I was dialing their ages down and down to signal to the other players "nope, not exploring sexuality here! My character's 14! Wait -11!" The relationships I want to throw them into are usually disfunctional parent-child ones. (No, that's not about my father, actually. You're almost there, though).
