Vincents intentions regarding queer concept

Hi!

I would like to ask about pronouns in AW. I was suprised to find that pronouns related to MC and characters (Angel, Chopper etc) were "she" and "her" (MC's job is = her job is). AFAIK in other games (Vampire is an exeption) written in english there were usually male pronouns as related to Game Master and "he" or "he or she" as related to characters (Fighter, Cleric).

Why you chose this solution? For me it's something different (I wasn't used to it, but I like it very much), but I'm not sure what the conventions in english are now, especially in hobby (is this breaking the tradition or choosing new conventions?).

 

Very interesting and useful thoughts in that topic.
Also, it comes in a moment where I’m playing with my friends an Aw campaign,  which is set in a world where women are dominant and men are enslaved (literally, in many cases), and are considered merely as a lower (if not the lowest) human being.
 
I think the main idea of our setting is the fact that a guy it is intended as a totally different species from the women.
That opens up a whole lot of questions about sexuality, in a more radical way. That’s the point where I wanted to get. The “old world” gendered habits are long forgotten, or maybe I should say totally unknown. So you don’t know nothing about sex, relationships, or any other issues related to gender roles, and you will discover and create everything from the basement.
[we are just at the second session, and I’m playing a skinner not mc’ing, so I can’t tell much more about our game itself. All we know for now is that we are slaves and live in an enclave run by a matriarch.] 

WildeL: Interesting!

Petra: In English, the correct gender-nonspecific pronouns are "he" or "they" (depending on whom you ask). It's sort of typical in roleplaying games since Vampire to use "she" for the GM and "he" for the players.

I decided long ago to use "she" by default, just because. I've been doing it that way for as long as I've been publishing games, with the exception of Poison'd.

-Vincent

Quite interesting!

I wrote my bachelor in gender studies :)

Some peculiar ideas to have in mind when thinking about the genders;

*The One gender model

Everyone is more or less male, sort of like percentage of MAN. The less percentage of man you are, the more weak and different you are, both physically and mentally. Thus women, the lesser male, was easier subjected to the devil's machinations and was easily corrupted by demonic forces. This was the usual form of perceiving gender until about 1750. I'm simplifying this, just giving the core of it.

*Two gender model

With the advent of science, experiments, the unbanning of cutting open corpses, there started to be ideas that humans are divided into two genders. The genders became very important in biology, where all sorts of living things was divided by gender. All these differences are physical, you can see them with the eye, thus they had to be universally true.
But what about the soul or the mind? This had to be examined as well! Hysteria was a mental illness that more or less only women could have, to give an example.

I know this thread is ancient but something in my real life brought it to my attention again.
Every year, I go to Wasteland Weekend, a post-apocalypse themed festival in California. I run a small operation there and for the last ten years or so, this paragraph has always been in the back of my head when I sit down to design an experience that will be welcoming of the people that usually get passed over by the standard Mad-Max hyper-testosterone aesthetic. I've quoted it to people for years and someone inspired me to finally find the original again so I could share it.

It's our post-apocalypse. What are we going to make of it?

I read a really interesting piece on post-apocalypses and feminism I wish that I could find again. It had looked at a variety of post-apocalypses. In each, had power-based interpersonal hierarchies come to dominate, or had they broken down? And for each, which portion of the audience found it "grim" and "depressing"? The conclusion the piece reported was that straight white dudes tended to find post-apocalypses where power-based interpersonal hierarchies had broken down grim, where, y'know, women and people of color and queer people tended to find the same post-apocalypses optimistic, and considered the post-apocalypses where a dude with a gun or a "pure" vision took control and led with an iron fist to be the grim ones.