Gender Fluidity in Avaria, and Other Sex- and Gender-Based Themes

Song of Avaria is a story-focused game, and conflict drives narrative, so that is why we have included pretty much every conflict.

The reason we have these themes of discrimination is so that players can roleplay characters who want to oppose them, without all the teeth being taken out of those kinds of stories.

Discrimination exists in the real world, and it can't be completely removed from a game world. An example is where we see non-sexist fantasylands but plenty of women are still using sex as a weapon. Women don't use sex as weapons when they have real power in the world. The problem is that we can't divorce ourselves entirely from reality.

So, our choice is to pin that reality down and tell stories about it. Discrimination exists thematically, but you can roleplay a struggle against it -- and you can even achieve victories, unlike games that refuse to allow their setting to change at all. Did Inaya, a woman, become the mutineer captain of the Greenest Dolphin? 

While discrimination exists in the setting, a great deal of our efforts as admins genuinely goes into telling stories that run counter to the setting and contain revolutionary material for player-characters to build off. Was the First Mate of the Greenest Dolphin actually not a man? The ditzy perfumer actually a wily arms smuggler? The ship 'witch' actually male? At the feast at the manor, was the Greyleigh daughter actually a talented huntress despite her father's benevolent patriarchal doubts? 

It's true that there are other sources of meaningful conflict, sources that don't touch uncomfortably close to real-life topics. But we want to tell stories that pull heartstrings, that are powerful, that cause us to grow, that give us catharsis. And we do want these painful themes of real discrimination to be present for us to engage with -- and that's on the box, we hope, we don't want anyone to feel blindsided or triggered by engaging with these themes. 

Even if someone wants to engage with these themes but is uncomfortable in a specific scene, they can use an xcard to gloss over it. And further, none of our plots directly center these themes, so they can be relatively avoidable should someone not want to engage with them too deeply.

Avaria is a very historically-flavored world. The religions, the geographic landmasses, and the cultures have a lot of parallels to fifteenth-century counterparts. Some might call this laziness in worldbuilding, but seeing how Mistsparrow works, I don't think it's lazy at all. It's actually very interesting, because there is so much in the real world that comes to exist in Avaria as well, and even the more magical things are specifically designed to work in the context. It's also a fascinating highlight on a section of real world history that is often ignored or downplayed -- the period in which North Africa and the Middle East was actually the relatively-enlightened hub of global affairs, rather than the West.

As a fantasy world, Avaria has more internal coherence than any other fantasy world I've roleplayed in before, and it's far more immense in scope, too. So, there is also a worldbuilding facet of historical realism that is active in having thematic discrimination of so many kinds present -- but still, it's been muted enough for these themes to be less difficult to engage with, and Omrazir -- which will be our central location eventually -- is more progressive than many other places in the world. It's still not a modern environment, though, and characters would find plenty of conflict if they wanted to engage with these themes. 

I believe that if we listen to players and help players feel safe to report actual harassment or even a whiff of harassment being OOC rather than IC, we will find anyone who is playing in bad faith and remove them. We turned a temp ban into a perma-ban already based on a tip about someone actually having some very bad politics IRL.

This is not a game where we will say you're not allowed to discuss politics OOC. Because you totally can. I have already discussed politics, anyone who knows me knows that I have some pretty firm views and don't get along well with people who have oppressive perspectives. We don't want people who are bigots around here and we will remove them if we find them.

I'm not done listening to players on this yet, as I sent some OOCmails that still haven't been fully answered... but I did want to repeat some of the stuff said in the beginning of this thread.

1. We actively want players to fight against discrimination. If you want to roleplay a counterculture movement, please do so! That would be a wonderful story and is expressly why the discrimination exists in theme. People can have all sorts of revolutions against the things they don't like. It is not a static world.
2. There are cultures in Avaria that offer alternative perspectives and recognize third genders, and Mistsparrow is constantly reading and has taken inspiration from all over the place, but these cultures could likely stand to have some more documentation. I've heard that maybe one thing that would help would be if there was better documentation and better options for characters whose players do not want them to have been shaped by discrimination, at least in their backgrounds.

Lastly (for now) I want to apologize if any of the language I've used has been hurtful to anyone. Being queer is not my personal struggle, and I could probably use a sensitivity reader when it comes to discussing it. But I can vouch for the fact that some of my personal struggles are in this game world, and I do get mildly triggered by them sometimes, but... that doesn't change the fact that I find value from having them around to engage with in roleplay.
 

I appreciate reading that! And honestly I thrive on figuring out bugs by purpose or accident and playing it was not difficult. The only flustering part was generating with no clothes (I laughed till I cried haha) which made the disguise part a bit possible fail, but players and yourself handled it well.

In reading the recent posts, my character creation was purposeful in that they may face gender and sexuality conflicts. Are those things I enjoy facing in real life, absolutely not. But my character can possibly handle that differently that I myself may have been able to. My character may defy social conventions, and while I am comfortable facing the possible conflicts, it isn't to everyone's same degree of toleration. (I was also amongst many fans of Alanna the Lioness growing up, who disguised herself to become a knight.)

In the historical realism vs gameplay, I feel the key is a balancing act. Our shipwrecked group would probably haved face more outright xenophobia, but some of it is more subtle in costs being higher etc than being pelted with outright attitudes. Some characters aim attitudes back at the current 'backwater land' in ways I find thematically fitting and well written, although personally writing similar is not my cup of tea or entirely in character. Would the current land vs homelands of characters be gossiping/judging about reputations of characters being too close together in relationships? I dunno! Perhaps many on the ship dealt with all the hell of the mist and have more important thoughts about getting home than judging, or privately do.

I am wondering if the game may benefit something similar to Silent Heaven's consent checklist, which players can check of other characters after a certain amount of time rping scenes. (Some themes can be run by storytellers there, and much was horror and an entirely other set of themes.) We do have the xcards, and I hope everyone is comfortable using them, but heading off some themes with a checklist to avoid triggers may be benefical, even if only viewable for staff viewing.

For this in particular "Our intentions in making this post were twofold: to make sure that nobody felt gaslit about their thematic reactions (as has happened in the past regarding misogynistic themes) and to make sure that we weren't deceiving anyone into generating a character that would be uncomfortable for them to play. We always want to be very up-front about any potentially triggering material."

My thoughts are perhaps some themes that could be addressed in character applications upfront if the general playerbase is unsure on trusting if rp is thematic or real life bigotry. (I've not any firm ideas for this, beyond as mentioned reports if people aren't sure.) And in the long term lifespan of the game, we do have non-human races like the angrosh in conflict with humans, and I expect that would spur similar themes then.

This is going to be long.

There were various long-considered reasons for including a lot of real-life sources of conflict in Avaria, including conflicts over gender roles and bigotry. Pilgrim stated one of the really key reasons above: Conflict drives stories, and Avaria is a story-centered game. And different people do enjoy roleplaying out different kinds of conflict, for many different personal reasons. Pilgrim and I actually have some pretty different tastes in what kinds of conflict we most enjoy roleplaying about, but we've generally tended to err in favor of including a greater number of sources of conflict, even where one of us is made somewhat uncomfortable by a particular source.

Another reason for including age-old bigotries and prejudices is that Avaria is a heavily historically flavored fantasy world. For me, having Avaria be entirely without traditional gender roles and various kinds of prejudice and bigotry would be as jarring as reading an historical fiction novel where all of, say, Plantagenet England was going around with socially modern ideas.

I will admit that I also have what might be deemed an unhelpfully extreme obsession with creating a world where everything is, in my head at least, internally coherent. The magic analogy is actually pretty apropos here. Magic does exist in Avaria, but it isn't common or widespread among the populace. Why? Because a world where most people can and do perform truly incredible feats of magic on a regular basis would almost certainly not look anything like 15th-century Earth -- realistically it would be something incredibly different, something probably rather bizarre.

To go off on a short tangent, I've devoted a lot of effort to creating background lore that explains why, if magic exists, life is still going on in an overall 15th-century-Earth way. A big part of that is making most magic conform to what people in this real-earth time period actually used to believe was real and functional. Another part of that is making big, powerful, D&D-type flashy magic very rare, and achievable only after a significant investment of time and study and occasional peril to the practitioner's life and limb (or sanity). A third part has been giving ordinary people some natural resistance to magic via the idea of Grounding. So yes, magic exists, but I have tried very hard to make it exist in a way the preserves the integrity of a roughly 15th-century-Earth world.

At the risk of trivializing something that people naturally have much stronger feeling about, gender and sexuality in Avaria operate much the same way, to me. If there is no bigotry or prejudice around these things, then what does this society look like? It almost certainly doesn't look like most of 15th-century Earth. A society not only lacking gender roles, but lacking even the idea of gender roles -- and, quite honestly, lacking some amount of the misogyny that has warped most societies for countless generations -- is going to be something just completely different. Social structures, family structures, marriage and childrearing practices, manner of dress and personal adornment, warfare, the whole structure and ideology of life would be different. We don't have anything like this in our own modern Western world.

So basically if all real-world type prejudices were removed, Avaria would have to be completely rebuilt from scratch in order to create a very different world that would still seem realistic to me, and then I'm not sure if any of us could identify and uproot our own real-world internalized prejudices and beliefs and baggage well enough to roleplay realistically in it. So to me it's better to play with those prejudices and baggage, consciously, and ideally become even more conscious of them by playing.

On a more personal note, I actually really do enjoy roleplaying about struggles with gender stereotypes and prejudices, and even outright misogyny. It's something I've written into many characters' backgrounds where it heavily influenced the course of their lives, even in settings where opportunities to roleplay about these themes in-game were (to me) disappointingly limited. This may be an uncommon thing to enjoy, but I have met at least a few other roleplayers who also liked exploring these themes and playing characters who struggled with and against these prejudices, both externally and internally. It may not add something to everyone's experience, but personally I've often found it  very cathartic to roleplay about, and rewarding when my characters managed to overcome some aspect of bigotry directed against them.

When I was in my younger teenage years there were a number of different YA novels I read that involved gender prejudice in various ways, with the heroine having to struggle against it in order to accomplish her goals and become who she wanted to be. Probably there were a host of things in these books that would seem extremely unenlightened by today's standards, but the essential story of these books was something I loved: "Young woman struggles against adversity with courage and intelligence and triumphs!" To me this was a lot more satisfying a story, as well as more relevant to my own life, than "young woman happens to exist in a world where she can be exactly what she wants and is accepted by everybody with no effort whatsoever". If you removed the adversity in those books, there was literally no real story anymore.

Yes, you can definitely have books where frictionlessly empowered heroines go do battle against, say, a secret society of evil necromancers instead, and maybe the evil necromancers might be a metaphor for some other real-world societal evil that makes for a compelling tale. But personally, I found the story of a woman struggling against gender prejudice and ultimately winning out over it inspiring -- because it mirrored the sorts of struggles I felt in my own life, rather than pretending like those struggles didn't exist. It made those battles feel winnable. In a real world, and a real society, where a gender power imbalance and a lot of prejudices definitely still exist, vicariously experiencing someone struggling against these things, going through rough times, but ultimately winning out felt deeply valuable to me. And it still does.

As Pilgrim said, struggling against oppression and winning are a meant to be a real part of Avaria. My ideal for Avaria is a place that evolves over time, with a combination of player efforts and gradual Big Picture storylines.

The ideal for St. Loomis is that, exposed to people from a different and in many ways more advanced cuture (materially and socially), the village and its people evolve into a place where two cultures fruitfully combine and tolerance for difference increases. This may or may not actually happen like that, but that was the original ideal.

The ideal for Omrazir is that many conflicts and prejudices will continue to exist to roleplay about, but the opportunity to fight injustice and enact real change is there. The caliphate has not always been as hierarchical and stratified as it is now, and many people want change -- a return to the old days of greater egalitarianism, or a new and freer future entirely. This includes not just a rejection of class and wealth inequities, but of ethnic and gender prejudices as well.

Other cultures do exist in Avaria where third genders and non-binary identities exist, along with different understandings of sexuality. They aren't really a thing in the mainstream cultures of the caliphate, not because genderqueer identities are modern, but because they aren't a thing that actually evolved in that particular setting in real-earth history. The angrosh are a people who have a third gender concept. Certain groups among the Irulao do as well. There are other peoples out there elsewhere in the world who have very different ways of thinking and doing things, not just in terms of gender inequalities but inequalities of all kinds.

One part of the future evolution of Avaria is meant to involve stories where members of these cultures come into contact with the peoples of the caliphate, and it starts to be a very real idea within the caliphate that different ways of being in the world exist. If everyone in the caliphate is already modernly-minded and enlightened, these cultures lose their distinctiveness and color, and things remain static -- statically enlightened, but static.

I really want to see Avaria evolve over time. I would love to see players strive against the obstacles society has placed before them, and win. Honestly, I don't feel as if I get to win much in the real world, struggling against real obstacles and crises. Being able to win something in Avaria, even if it is just a small win in a made-up fantasy world, feels like a little spark of hope that maybe people can carry over into the real world.

I do feel like I've really failed to give people more lore options to avoid uncomfortable themes at this point in development, and failed also to give people more faith that they can change the world for the better through their roleplay. It also seems very possible that a lot of people don't like to roleplay about the things that I do. That being the case, while I can't say we plan to write all of these kinds of conflicts out of the lore, I hope we can provide more ability for people to skirt around some of the things that are particularly unpleasant for them to play through.

 Wow, a lot to weigh in about here. I have hesitated because gender and sexuality is a little too close to my RL heart, actually, and I didn't want to make this thread about all the many thoughts I have about that. But I haven't seen anyone express views similar to my own on a few of the raised issues, so I want to do that now. I'll try to keep it brief. 8)

1) What potential value may gender/sexuality-based conflict have in this game in particular?

So, I don't have a position on whether or not SoA should abandon identity-based prejudice as a feature of the world, because it's evident that some people are uncomfortable with it and I am not sure that any amount of value others may find in exploring these themes outweighs that discomfort. However, I personally would be disappointed if the thematic documentation were changed to read "and there is no such thing as sexism or homophobia" either in Avaria or in the Sirdabi Caliphate. "How disappointed?" is a question I don't presently have a clear answer to, but I am leaning toward very disappointed, at this moment.

Here's why:

TMI time. Look away now, it's your last chance. Lol. I have dealt with these prejudices, and the resulting awareness of other, related prejudices, all my life. I have been marked and shaped by them to such an extent that I am unable to envision myself in their absence. It is impossible for me to create a character who has not himself been shaped by my experiences of these prejudices. If my PC, whoever he is, is obligated to inhabit a world in which ostensibly* these prejudices do not exist, I worry that he will not make sense. I worry that he will be a fragment of ancient stone engraved with an urgent message in a lost language, no longer readable by anyone alive.

But more than that, and more importantly, I keep coming back to these games in part because years ago I had some storytelling experiences with what were, for me at the time, soaring emotional power and philosophical depth. It was an addictive feeling. By and large, the mechanism behind the most moving stories, for me, has been catharsis. I am always hoping for story threads that may lead in this direction. I was excited by the idea of getting to focus on telling stories in a MUD because I want to tell stories that matter to me, instead of being told stories by writers or administrators about what matters to them - which is what every other game is about. And stories that matter to me are stories that reflect my life experience, and the person that has made me, and give me a chance to have moving resolutions - something that rarely if ever comes about in real life. My PCs are different from me in many ways, always, but there are certain things that are endemic to my imagination because they are themes and situations that are deeply affecting to me and have dominated my experience. It would be tremendously difficult, in addition to disheartening, for me to play without hanging at least some of my narrative meat on those hooks. I would still try to do it, of course. But some part of me would feel locked out of the most fertile emotional storytelling spaces available to me.

I realize this is not everyone's experience, so I can't argue for keeping these elements for these reasons. But I wanted to express this because no one had, so far, and because to whatever extent some people may feel uncomfortable with these themes because they assume that no one to whom they were relevant would enjoy them, I wanted to make sure this side of things had been voiced.

2) Doesn't it work just as well to have prejudice regarding things a character has chosen (lifestyle, religion, magic, etc)?

Just as well? Personally, I don't think it does - precisely because no one cares about these things as much as they care about things people can't change. I would have more faith in these issues as primary conflict motivators if there were more solid and explicit thematic support, with plenty of elaboration. I think players struggle to supply the beating emotional heart of conflicts they don't completely understand/intuit, which is why visceral real life themes have so much raw emotional power - for better and for worse. It's extremely difficult to create a truly convincing facsimile of that out of whole cloth - though not impossible.

3) Don't prejudice themes invite prejudiced people to act like jerks with plausible deniability?

Maybe, although I have relatively little concern about this, mainly because I think it's actually fairly easy to tell when someone is styling themselves a villain and interested in your entertainment vs when someone is sadistically entertaining themselves by picking on you, at least for people who have all the data (the administration). I do worry that people might not report behavior they're unsure of (or even behavior they are sure of!). The ideal system does not require victims to advocate for themselves, and I don't have a solution to that, particularly. However, I must add my next point.

4) Does the absence of prejudice themes mean that no one will express prejudice or that OOC prejudice will be more obvious and therefore easier to regulate?

I really don't think so. But to put all my cards on the table, I worry a lot more about latent and unacknowledged prejudice than I do about overt prejudice. Overt prejudice is relatively easy to deal with if the world and the administration is on your side - the bigot is objectively Wrong, and there are Consequences, and you are to be protected in various prescribed ways. What can really ruin a game for me is when I just feel like certain PCs treat mine differently, sometimes worse but sometimes just according to simplistic or ill-fitting stereotypes, than other PCs for no legitimate IC reason - but not in a way I could readily prove. Moreover, very often those players would claim to have no bias, to be open-minded, etc. It's their word against mine. Is it possible that I just projected prejudice onto them because of past experiences, and I've actually done them harm in this situation? Should I feel guilty, or should I stand up for myself?

Regardless of the themes involved in this game, people are racist. They are sexist. They are homophobic. The idea that we could escape that by normalizing a blanket lack of identity-based prejudice in the game feels wrong-headed to me. It would also prohibit us from playing out our complicated feelings about those issues in a safe space with likeminded people. Personally, I would enjoy much more confronting my own deeply buried and shameful feelings of racial prejudice than pat myself on the back about how anti-racist my preferred MUD is. The idea that we can escape prejudice feels, to me, a bit of a privileged notion to begin with, to be honest.

However, I take seriously the idea that well-meaning and progressive people may avoid the game because it appears to them to be apologizing for prejudice rather than confronting it. It's a shame, to me, though. I earnestly feel that prejudice isn't something that can be run away from; it lurks in the heart and confronting it honestly is the only way to marginalize it. But... I don't want to advocate for the discomfort of others. So. These are just my feelings on the matter. <3

There are so many amazing points here. Thank you all, seriously.

I just wanted to make one point that is a bit of an echo of what pilgrim was saying, but from a player viewpoint:

The actual in-game reality, thus far, has not been oppressive - at least not to me, playing a character who does not conform to several of these norms (gender roles, appearance to a certain degree, sexuality, one or two others that are spoilers).

BUT, just as pof Esfandiar says, if we were to handwave and say, "Actually, sexism and homophobia and gender role oppression doesn't exist or is trivial in Avaria," then huge chunks of my character's background and struggle and meaning would be utterly lost. I believe the same is probably true for many other characters.

I think we need to make sure to recognise the distinction between having a thing exist in the WORLD, as a source of inspiration, oppression, struggle, and triumph, and having it extant and omnipresent in the GAME. I agree that these things should exist in the world, for all the reasons pilgrim, Mistsparrow, and pof Esfandiar have outlined. I also think that in the game, it should be a choice whether or not to engage deeply with these themes - and it is, currently! Some people want to explore these stories, and some do not. I personally want them to shape my character's history, but often I do not want to deal with, for example, sexism in my day to day gameplay. And my perception so far is that what we've already got going allows both of these things to exist side by side, and that's awesome, actually.

Perhaps the only thing that needs to change is the communication of this divide, to an extent - that it be made clearer that when you, for example, roll a female PC, you will not take a 50% penalty to dice rolls for getting jobs or a pay cut, that you can be a warrior, etc etc - but that being a warrior is still unusual. Exceptional. That's what we all want to be anyway, right? ;) But playing an exceptional, "abnormal," whatever you want to call it, character in game currently does not force you into any kind of disadvantage or handicap, whatsoever - and I think maybe that's where some of us are worried, is that having documentation and lore saying "the world is this way" might seem to lend itself to "the game will play this way." When in fact, in my experience, it does not, in this game.

A bit late. Apologies. I do not read the forums much, and I haven't played in a little while. Hopefully starting back up again.

1. I love that the setting discriminates against my character. I like being weird and unsettling to the 'average' citizen. Loved being called a devil or a demon on the boat (and was a little disappointed when everyone ended up a 'devil' like my character when we landed, hehe). I like having beliefs and behaviors that are not trusted, though I wish there was more guidance so I wasn't making them up as I go. Her sexual orientation hasn't come up, but the sort of conflict that exists around it is an okay level for me. That is, there's outlets for affection in acceptable ways and all public sexuality is largely shunned. I don't like public sexual behavior on characters I play (or seeing it in general, tbh), so this sort of background works for me and doesn't really impact my play much.

2. I enjoy stories about my character's weird faith and culture and how it conflicts with the norm.. I would not want stories about my character's orientation. Like, as a background element it's good to me. As a focus for stories, no. Seasoning, maybe, not main dish. Gender expression? I would not mind a little more trouble there. It hasn't come up at all that she's a bit tomboyish. I would be okay if it did. I do not think I'd want that to be the focus of an arc, but it's a more interesting conflict to me. Exploring cultural taboos and grey areas and transgressing on them and finding spaces where people aren't meant to fit in a culture and trying to make a fit anyway is interesting to me. Can't do that if everyone and everything is totally accomodating. It's not satisfying to push if nothing pushes back.

3. Staff have been cool so far. I have no reason to expect reports to not be acted upon.

I do have a little concern about the line "the dearth of trans people as an existing cultural phenomena" - while there are many cultures where 'trans' as an identity as we understand it does not exist, trans people do exist in these cultures, and there is often some form of cultural place for them. Some of this is addressed in talk of things like kuchek dancers, which is great. I'd maybe want any future wiki or policy pages on the topic to focus on what sort of spaces are available for people with this form of dysphoria and/or identity to express themselves. The wording of the above line could be read as erasure, though I don't think that was the intent at all after reading the rest of the initial post.

Is it that transphobia doesn't exist because people do not care about your gender presentation so long as it's one or the other and thus assigned sex doesn't matter? That's interesting to me. That's the impression I got. As someone who is some flavor of NB, I can see why being unable to play the inbetween spaces without trouble could be distressing. For me, personally, I don't mind it. I like being able to transgress and work through the consequences of that in a safe and fictional space. Having a way out for those who find it troubling may also be nice, like via social roles that exist for that purpose. X-cards are good to keep it from spilling over too far, but I'm not sure how much they'll help the problem of "this character who shares this trait with me is unwelcome in this space because of that trait" which can be an uncomfortable pressure even when it isn't in the forefront of play.

Thanks for weighing in, everyone who did!

While we're not done thinking about this yet, and people are still free to discuss it and bring up any concerns, we've come to some decisions on what we're going to do:

1.  All of these difficulties will remain in the theme of the game, to be explored and engaged with in some form.
2.  While the bigoted themes will stay for now (pending potential story changes in the future), we wouldn't make them the lynchpins of any staff-run plot unless it was something requested by a player. And any story about these themes will center firmly on the OOC knowledge that bigotry is wrong.
3.  We'll be working on documenting how characters can avoid having a background shaped by bigotry, and avoid having bigoted perspectives on certain issues (though likely not all), in character generation. However, the player should know that bigotry is a present force in the world and the character will probably come across it at some point.
4.  We'll also be adding in a scale where players can mark what sort of story conflict they're most and least interested in, so that staff can provide that conflict when players do want it and avoid going out of their way to bring it up when players don't necessarily enjoy it. This doesn't mean that it will be always entirely avoidable, though.
5.  We'll be adding more up-front content warnings so that nobody will be surprised by the fact that these themes are present on the game, and that any player might end up witnessing or coming across them if they are playing in this world. There are many wonderful games that people are working on, and the majority that we know of don't allow stories about these kinds of conflicts. If people want conflict, they should know that they can roleplay about it here, and that as staff we will be supportive as long as all conflict remains within strictly IC bounds.

I want to thank you and Mist Sparrow for posting about this. As a person who has played conflict rp before, even thriving on it an extent, unless its physical icky harm to my char, as long as it doesn't stay that way forever. In the past I've played in a non magical society that as a Pagan made me feel quite odd. Because in irl magic and paganism are really important to me. Playing those roles was interesting. How do I as a Pagan live in a world where magic is seen as anathema? How does an ace character play in a world where Aces might been seen as weird is fine, again with the caveats that physical harm doesn't happen. If there's something that feels to real to me oocly, I feel its better to disengage from the scene as carefully as I can and take a breakk. this might sound odd or even be a weird way to disengage with conflict. But as an irl blind person I've faced some prety interesting, and sometimes painful experiences as a disabled person. Even to the point of infantilization. I also study LGBT history, not as a career but as an interest of mine. Because its very personal to me. In a way I wondered how to balance my ooc knowledge with the lore. Because I want to try to respect the world building that has gone in this game. As a person who enjoys worldbuilding myself, I also delve into societal, anthropological and cultural things that make sense in the world because of these cultural norms. So I guess conflict rp intrigues me, but I also know that there might be things that come close to home. I suppose what I am trying to say is, there are ways to deal with conflict rp, and there are Ways. Would I like a world where none of this is there? Sure, it'd be great. However it would jar me because of my own experiences in irl. So even though it would be idealistic and very pacifist of me to be like, peace brother! Lol. Its not realistic. So the best thing for me, is to simply deal with the realism, while respecting myself and understanding where the realism becomes real.