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Characters and such.
Jan. 25th, 2002 12:29 pmI've just been tidying up some logs from Ashes to Ashes, where I play Fang. He's a relatively recent character of mine, but I've been having an absolute blast playing him.
(brief pause as co-worker comes in and requires assistance locating documentation of stuff that happened September through December)
I have a fairly strong tendency to play men. I like to tell people this goes back to first grade, when I was tapped to play Santa Claus because I was half an inch taller than Larissa, who was a full inch taller than Gregory, but that's not really it. I mean, true, I've played males on stage a few times since then... being skinny, tall, and attending an all-female high school will do that to you. But that's nothing unusual, in that setting. With the exception of certain musicals (you CANNOT score Tevye's part to fit the adolescent female voicebox unless someone has a hormone disorder) and plays with kissing scenes, *all* the plays had all-female casts. Playing a male on stage was nothing particularly unusual. You might try out for the part of Anna and get the King instead, just because you were better at his songs. (Or you could be me, and try out for any speaking part at all and get Ugly Deckhand #3 - but that was freshling year, things got better after.)
Online it's something else. That's more a matter of choice. My first MUSH character of all time, ever, not counting the 'character' created as a login for my school's purely social/learn-to-build/learn-to-code MUSH, was Kyria Raichur, head of house Raichur at DuneMUSH the Very First. My *second* was her cousin and heir, and my first male character. I was looking for someone to more or less be the . . . well, no, not the Bad Cop so much as the Scary Cop. Nikos was a grim, restrained, plotting, cold nasty man, and while I had a lot of fun with him at the time you couldn't call him anything like a well-developed character. He was brought into existence because I wanted a new character lined up in case Kyria got killed; he was male because at the time, grim nasty scary bastards all seemed to be male. That, and most of the Landsraad faction seemed to listen more to males, it was more or less part of the Dune setting...
After that came City of Darkness, and while I started off female there, I eventually created my first male character. Without knowing it, he became the first in a long, long line - not only of males, but of attempts to compensate for stuff that annoyed me in the virtual worlds around me. Everyone at CoD was outstanding in some way, or glamourous, or otherwise unusual. A friend of mine complained that there were no *ordinary* people in the world, it seemed, so I took that as a challenge, and Dafydd Rowlands was born. Average in appearance and physical prowess, male, fortyish, divorced, one daughter. G7 jobs evaluation manager for British Telecomm. These days a background like that would cause people to start howling 'Syndicate' on the spot, but at the time Dafydd just caused a lot of puzzlement. He was very much like a normal person, and nobody did that. Poor bastich was the target of more attempts to discover What He Really Was than I can remember. By the end of his online existence he was on the Zantac prescription from hell, because all of the weirdness around him had driven him to ulcers.
I'm not sure why I kept playing males after that. A lot of it was that people had genuinely believed Dafydd to be the creation of a male player, and I enjoyed being able to 'pass'. Some of it was that, at the time, there were many many stupid people on the MUSHes where I played, and many of them were of the opinion that crappy pickup line + 3-succ seduction roll = a reason to call a judge if the other person refused to tumble. That happened to my female Garou once. I got out of that scene without trouble, but didn't want to deal with such nonsense again, so . . . well, nobody did that to *male* characters, from what I'd seen. Guys it was.
Took me a long time to really get it right, of course. I had one or two male characters accused of being gay, at least in part for their failure to pick up on female characters' cues of interest. This was in no small part my own fault - *I* didn't recognize the cues. Once I nearly blew it because of punctuation, of all things - a building wiz looked at my room desc and said 'my God, a man who knows the correct way to use a semicolon!'. But eventually I figured it out well enough that I didn't have to pretend to be male OOC, because people believed the characters were male IC and naturally assumed the player was, too. I liked that. It meant I'd gotten it right.
Which leads, in its own way, back to Fang. A while back I'd looked at the ethnic distribution of the online world, and gotten a little peeved. Most of the WoD I've seen online is, frankly, as White as the neighborhood Calvin and Hobbes apparently takes place in. (Think back. Was there ever so much as a single Black character in Calvin's world? Even in Miss Wormwood's classroom scenes?) Well, okay, not that bad - but at least as bad as Friends. If you run into ethnic minority characters, they're almost inevitably supernaturals of some kind. And a *tremendous* number of them are being played by people from another ethnic or racial group... often badly. I mean, the players are doing their best to live up to what they think the group is like (at least I assume they're trying), but ... it doesn't always work. Happens any time you play to an image, I guess, instead of the real thing. It's the same reason every third or fourth character at Paris: Les Fleurs du Mal seemed to be some sort of fashion model. Playing to the image of wealthy Europeans with excuses to do neat things, I guess.
Anyway, Fang was constructed with the help of . . . shoot, I've forgotten your LJ name, you know who you are. . . in an effort to pull a Dafydd. (Or an Anselm, or a Bob Torres, for that matter.) The implicit goals in Fang's creation process were simple.
1. Must be Asian. Highly unusual Asians were getting under my skin at the time.
2. Must be male. Most of the annoying ones were female - I couldn't remember seeing a single bloody Asian guy anywhere online in ages.
3. Must be *solely* Asian. Apparently due to the lack of Asian males, the online world had an amazing number of Eurasian outcrosses.
4. Must *look* Asian. Sweet mother of Buddha, they all had green eyes! Or blue! Even the ones with no other Caucasoid features! Hello?
5. Must not be Japanese. C'mon, people, all you Michikos and Ikeshojis and God only knows what other names out there, Japan's only part of the Asiatic world. There *are* sort of MORE THAN A BILLION PEOPLE OF OTHER COUNTRIES in the region. *pant pant* sorry.
6. Must not be enigmatic, independently wealthy, into mysterious philosophy, passionately into technology or criminally entangled. Also no otaku, and no lifelong martial artists.
7. And no !*&)(!& supernatural involvement. That would take care of itself. It always does.
The end result was Xiang Fang, whose English name was Victor. He was the uncle of Hsiang Ho, my Akashic Brother in Cadhla's mage game - Ho being an attempt at innovation within a semi-realistic framework in and of himself. Fang is from Hong Kong and, in his own words, "pushes heavy things, pulls levers, and fools with the lights" at Bay City University. He's a stage hand from Hong Kong, and he wants to become a citizen. Almost made it into the Beijing School of Opera as a kid, but an ill-timed indiscretion with an admissions official's daughter put a stop to *that*. Yes, he's studied kung fu, but it wasn't to kick ass and it wasn't to cultivate inner tranquility. It was part of his stage career in Hong Kong, along with acrobatics and a certain amount of weapons training. He wants to get into the American theater someday, but knows damn well a lifetime spent in Cantonese opera doesn't really do you much good in 1996 America; he figures he has to start somewhere, and since he can't afford acting classes, learning the American theater from backstage is as good a way as any to begin. He left Hong Kong because he could read a calendar as well as anyone else. Didn't wanna be there when July 1997 rolled around, no sir, not at *all*. Now he works two jobs and spends a big chunk of his spare time practicing the acrobatic and related skills he allowed to get rusty. If nothing else, he figures he might be able to get some parts by doing breathtaking visual stunts. When no one's looking, he works on a private dream of his: trying to adapt the operas he knows and loves so well into a format that'll go over well on the stage of his adopted country.
He's a *tremendous* amount of fun. I can't wait to have him go out in public with huge green kawaii-looking eyes, and then come down with a migraine mid-scene and pop out the contact lenses...
Anyway. That's my little attempt at counterbalancing the way of the online world. Just thought I'd share. Lemme know if I'm doin' it wrong.
(brief pause as co-worker comes in and requires assistance locating documentation of stuff that happened September through December)
I have a fairly strong tendency to play men. I like to tell people this goes back to first grade, when I was tapped to play Santa Claus because I was half an inch taller than Larissa, who was a full inch taller than Gregory, but that's not really it. I mean, true, I've played males on stage a few times since then... being skinny, tall, and attending an all-female high school will do that to you. But that's nothing unusual, in that setting. With the exception of certain musicals (you CANNOT score Tevye's part to fit the adolescent female voicebox unless someone has a hormone disorder) and plays with kissing scenes, *all* the plays had all-female casts. Playing a male on stage was nothing particularly unusual. You might try out for the part of Anna and get the King instead, just because you were better at his songs. (Or you could be me, and try out for any speaking part at all and get Ugly Deckhand #3 - but that was freshling year, things got better after.)
Online it's something else. That's more a matter of choice. My first MUSH character of all time, ever, not counting the 'character' created as a login for my school's purely social/learn-to-build/learn-to-code MUSH, was Kyria Raichur, head of house Raichur at DuneMUSH the Very First. My *second* was her cousin and heir, and my first male character. I was looking for someone to more or less be the . . . well, no, not the Bad Cop so much as the Scary Cop. Nikos was a grim, restrained, plotting, cold nasty man, and while I had a lot of fun with him at the time you couldn't call him anything like a well-developed character. He was brought into existence because I wanted a new character lined up in case Kyria got killed; he was male because at the time, grim nasty scary bastards all seemed to be male. That, and most of the Landsraad faction seemed to listen more to males, it was more or less part of the Dune setting...
After that came City of Darkness, and while I started off female there, I eventually created my first male character. Without knowing it, he became the first in a long, long line - not only of males, but of attempts to compensate for stuff that annoyed me in the virtual worlds around me. Everyone at CoD was outstanding in some way, or glamourous, or otherwise unusual. A friend of mine complained that there were no *ordinary* people in the world, it seemed, so I took that as a challenge, and Dafydd Rowlands was born. Average in appearance and physical prowess, male, fortyish, divorced, one daughter. G7 jobs evaluation manager for British Telecomm. These days a background like that would cause people to start howling 'Syndicate' on the spot, but at the time Dafydd just caused a lot of puzzlement. He was very much like a normal person, and nobody did that. Poor bastich was the target of more attempts to discover What He Really Was than I can remember. By the end of his online existence he was on the Zantac prescription from hell, because all of the weirdness around him had driven him to ulcers.
I'm not sure why I kept playing males after that. A lot of it was that people had genuinely believed Dafydd to be the creation of a male player, and I enjoyed being able to 'pass'. Some of it was that, at the time, there were many many stupid people on the MUSHes where I played, and many of them were of the opinion that crappy pickup line + 3-succ seduction roll = a reason to call a judge if the other person refused to tumble. That happened to my female Garou once. I got out of that scene without trouble, but didn't want to deal with such nonsense again, so . . . well, nobody did that to *male* characters, from what I'd seen. Guys it was.
Took me a long time to really get it right, of course. I had one or two male characters accused of being gay, at least in part for their failure to pick up on female characters' cues of interest. This was in no small part my own fault - *I* didn't recognize the cues. Once I nearly blew it because of punctuation, of all things - a building wiz looked at my room desc and said 'my God, a man who knows the correct way to use a semicolon!'. But eventually I figured it out well enough that I didn't have to pretend to be male OOC, because people believed the characters were male IC and naturally assumed the player was, too. I liked that. It meant I'd gotten it right.
Which leads, in its own way, back to Fang. A while back I'd looked at the ethnic distribution of the online world, and gotten a little peeved. Most of the WoD I've seen online is, frankly, as White as the neighborhood Calvin and Hobbes apparently takes place in. (Think back. Was there ever so much as a single Black character in Calvin's world? Even in Miss Wormwood's classroom scenes?) Well, okay, not that bad - but at least as bad as Friends. If you run into ethnic minority characters, they're almost inevitably supernaturals of some kind. And a *tremendous* number of them are being played by people from another ethnic or racial group... often badly. I mean, the players are doing their best to live up to what they think the group is like (at least I assume they're trying), but ... it doesn't always work. Happens any time you play to an image, I guess, instead of the real thing. It's the same reason every third or fourth character at Paris: Les Fleurs du Mal seemed to be some sort of fashion model. Playing to the image of wealthy Europeans with excuses to do neat things, I guess.
Anyway, Fang was constructed with the help of . . . shoot, I've forgotten your LJ name, you know who you are. . . in an effort to pull a Dafydd. (Or an Anselm, or a Bob Torres, for that matter.) The implicit goals in Fang's creation process were simple.
1. Must be Asian. Highly unusual Asians were getting under my skin at the time.
2. Must be male. Most of the annoying ones were female - I couldn't remember seeing a single bloody Asian guy anywhere online in ages.
3. Must be *solely* Asian. Apparently due to the lack of Asian males, the online world had an amazing number of Eurasian outcrosses.
4. Must *look* Asian. Sweet mother of Buddha, they all had green eyes! Or blue! Even the ones with no other Caucasoid features! Hello?
5. Must not be Japanese. C'mon, people, all you Michikos and Ikeshojis and God only knows what other names out there, Japan's only part of the Asiatic world. There *are* sort of MORE THAN A BILLION PEOPLE OF OTHER COUNTRIES in the region. *pant pant* sorry.
6. Must not be enigmatic, independently wealthy, into mysterious philosophy, passionately into technology or criminally entangled. Also no otaku, and no lifelong martial artists.
7. And no !*&)(!& supernatural involvement. That would take care of itself. It always does.
The end result was Xiang Fang, whose English name was Victor. He was the uncle of Hsiang Ho, my Akashic Brother in Cadhla's mage game - Ho being an attempt at innovation within a semi-realistic framework in and of himself. Fang is from Hong Kong and, in his own words, "pushes heavy things, pulls levers, and fools with the lights" at Bay City University. He's a stage hand from Hong Kong, and he wants to become a citizen. Almost made it into the Beijing School of Opera as a kid, but an ill-timed indiscretion with an admissions official's daughter put a stop to *that*. Yes, he's studied kung fu, but it wasn't to kick ass and it wasn't to cultivate inner tranquility. It was part of his stage career in Hong Kong, along with acrobatics and a certain amount of weapons training. He wants to get into the American theater someday, but knows damn well a lifetime spent in Cantonese opera doesn't really do you much good in 1996 America; he figures he has to start somewhere, and since he can't afford acting classes, learning the American theater from backstage is as good a way as any to begin. He left Hong Kong because he could read a calendar as well as anyone else. Didn't wanna be there when July 1997 rolled around, no sir, not at *all*. Now he works two jobs and spends a big chunk of his spare time practicing the acrobatic and related skills he allowed to get rusty. If nothing else, he figures he might be able to get some parts by doing breathtaking visual stunts. When no one's looking, he works on a private dream of his: trying to adapt the operas he knows and loves so well into a format that'll go over well on the stage of his adopted country.
He's a *tremendous* amount of fun. I can't wait to have him go out in public with huge green kawaii-looking eyes, and then come down with a migraine mid-scene and pop out the contact lenses...
Anyway. That's my little attempt at counterbalancing the way of the online world. Just thought I'd share. Lemme know if I'm doin' it wrong.
