Gender and Sexuality Representation in OOTS

[Shadowknight12]

Interestingly, both Miko and Celia got labeled as being "The DM's Girlfriend" when they were around. Which I found incredibly insulting even at the time.

I actually encountered that mentality on a thread a couple days ago. I was stunned out of my mind when I read it. The concept itself is also incredibly sexist, because it implies that the only reason a female player or character has power or agency is because it has been granted to her by a male authority.

Just going to back you up on this. As an active moderator at the time, I can attest that Miko really was quite the lightning rod. New forumites got verbally attacked because their first post was something like "I thought that kung-fu move Miko did was pretty awesome," and some of Miko's detractors couldn't abide her receiving anything that even remotely looked like a compliment. There were literally threads called things like the "The Anti-Miko Thread", "The Pro-Miko Thread" (which was less popular), the "The Anti-Pro MikoThread" (because it wasn't enough to hate the character, people felt so strongly they had to take a stand against people who didn't hate the character), "The Anti-Anti Miko Thread" (same reasons as before, just reversed), and I don't even remember how many permutations before we finally had a Forum Rules revision to shut all the nonsense down and get back to simply "vehement hatred of the character herself".

Suddenly the strict moderation makes perfect sense. Yikes, that must have been hell.

I do want to say that, while it might be a bit late for OOTS, given that most of the major character's sexualities have been defined, I think that if you were so inclined, you could write a good LGBT character because you write good characters, period. I mean, as tricky as inclusiveness can be, gay people are still people, and you write good people.

I couldn't agree more.