Maru (
yakalskovich) wrote in
ways_back_room2016-06-29 12:03 pm
Entry tags:
DE: Who you are, and who you're into
Discuss the gender identity and sexual orientation of your characters. Those tend to exist along a sliding scale; have there been changes or realisations since they came to Milliways?

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Seimei is a more complicated case, mostly due to the era and culture he originally comes from. He identifies as male, but the concept of "maleness" in the Heian era was different from modern Japanese (and certainly Western) maleness. His sexual preference is best described as "prefers humanoid females but can be persuaded."
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Gene - straight. Straighter than straight.
Javert - Gay. Which he only realised at Milliways, after a lifetime of holding himself above such petty matters as sex.
Valjean - More or less ace, but largely as a result of decades of suppression. He long ago resigned himself to the fact that anything romantic is Not For Him. But he and Javert will get it together eventually; Valjean strikes me as someone who'll take love where he can get it at this point, and gender doesn't really come into it.
Courfeyrac - straight, though I imagine he fooled around with other boys a bit in school. Same-sex environment, his cheerful acceptance and curiousity, a tolerant attitude for the times, etc. I do wonder if he's bi occasionally, but when he thinks about sex it's pretty much always with women.
Bruce Wayne - straight. X-centric.
Bruce Banner - straight, but convinced he's not safe to be around anyone.
Jack Aubrey - is straight, but canonically has Seen Things. He openly disapproves of men being gay, but he's also a sailor and lives among men, who also live among men, and there's often no female company for a looooong time. It wouldn't surprise me if he'd got roaring drunk once or twice, and done things he'd rather not acknowledge the next day. And he loves Stephen, though I do tend to think of it as platonic despite my best efforts.
Jim - as himself isn't really isn't interested in sleeping with anyone, because people bore him so much. He likes sex fine! Sometimes a lot! It's just that partners are so often disappointing, and he tends to get bored halfway through and tune out, whether he's with a man or woman. I suppose he's technically bi, or even pan, but he leans towards men when he's just being himself. When he's playing a character, he likes whatever he needs to like. And he definitely went through a teenage phase of just trying everything, partly because, teenager, and partly to learn things he might need to use in future. Everything he does is a potentially a weapon, or part of a plan, or for knowledge that can be used, and that includes sex and all it encompasses.
As he moves past canon - assuming he's done with it - he won't see too far past Sherlock. He already obsesses about him to a ridiculous degree, and other people become even less interesting in comparison.
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Athelstan - doesn't think of it like that, but probably bi leaning towards gay. There have been women, but one of them was when he was tripping on mushrooms and doesn't really count and there have been more men than women.
Giovanni Bruni - Straight. And all the willing young women of Venice will be finding that out for themselves.
Michael Carpenter - If he ever had an inclination to be anything other than straight (he would always have had a preference for women, no matter what), it doesn't matter any more, because Charity is It for him.
Jonathan Levinson - Bi, but doesn't really have sex with anybody much. He's busy.
Nancy (The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances) - Straight, but her most likely first experience with sex left her with a baby to raise all on her own, so it kind of put her off.
Cadfael - At this point, might as well be asexual for all the desire he feels. He did like the ladies before he took his vows, but he hasn't broken them in thirty or forty years.
Ichabod Crane (TV) - Straight.
James Norrington - Straight.
John Childermass - Not quite ace, but as close as makes no difference. If he does get the urge, I don't think it matters to him terribly what gender the nearest willing person is.
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I also still haven't really worked out just how Cyborg would have a sex life in the first place. G-rated characters don't lend themselves to such things easily, and I can't remember the last time the comics addressed the issue. But I wonder if at some level he doesn't entirely think of himself as having a sexuality. Maybe he is somewhere on the sliding scale between ace and straight? (He certainly finds women attractive.)
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Or, well, Yamato at least doesn't really know what his sexual orientation is, except sometimes he's attracted to people and it's just - it's just terrible, guys. It's just so terrible. So terrible. So very, very terrible.
Gabumon's gender is - debatable? In that whether he even has one is debatable, because different Digimon continuities run the gamut on this, from 'Digimon all have clearly defined gender identities' (Xros Wars) to 'Digimon seem to be functionally genderfluid, at least insofar as if they possess a human they take on their gender' (Cyber Sleuth) to 'Digimon are all explicitly genderless' (Tamers). I have no idea where Adventure sits on that scale, but I suspect it lies closer to Tamers than Xros Wars. His sexual orientation is a non-issue, on account of that not being a concept Digimon have, because they're all asexual, and also on account of being a youngish child (most of the time).
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Bossuet is a cis bi dude. Death and Milliways and getting older have put him off his Paris lifestyle of wandering around picking up casual encounters; he's honestly quite happy to just settle down with Joly now.
Feuilly is cis and gay. He's come more to terms with it since coming to Milliways and, you know, having a Hot Medieval Boyfriend, although his years of mostly suppressing a personal romantic life really had more to do with having other priorities than internal struggle with his sexuality. He had a girlfriend at one point, a really nice young widowed woman who read newspapers with him and let him teach her kids their letters, but Feuilly was vaguely relieved when she decided she wanted to just be friends after all. That's mostly to do with his political commitments and not wanting to take on family and dependents--but that in itself is part of gender dynamics. He's got a more accurate sense of what women can think and do than some of his friends but he's still got some of that basic 19th-c mindset that women are for families.
Ursula is cis and gayyyyy, super gay, she knows it, she's 100% happy with it. Men are mostly pretty pointless.
Gredya is cis and straight? The Wyr have a heat cycle thing going on and eh, I don't care enough to develop a whole worldbuilding gender identity thing for them, but at any rate Gredya for sure likes fucking Wyr guys when it's that time of year.
Djehuty is only vaguely corporeal. Like yeah, he's a male god, he probably enjoys sex with someone if he likes them because ancient Egypt seems to have had a pretty solid appreciation of that, but it's really not his job in life? He's sort of paired with Ma'at and sort of paired with Seshat and probably some other deities but eh.
William Douglas...oy, well, as I read it he's pretty well in love with his friend Jamie. Doesn't stop him from talking about women and being interested in women, but they're kind of accessories to an ideal world where he and Jamie rule Scotland forever, just the two of them, and they're bestest friends forever and ever and no one tells them what to do.
and Hal is a Shakespeare character with a dissolute libertine youth. Yeah yeah that doesn't necessarily mean anything specific about his gender and sexuality, but as far as I'm concerned he's tried and enjoyed quite a few things.
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I've still got a few books to go though, so maybe I'll change my mind. :D
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Sam is cis and male. I like head canons I've seen of him being gay, bi, or pan, but the voice in my head is predominately into women. He's not afraid of admitting and expressing love for another male though and he will never, *ever*, utter the words, "No homo."
Hank is cis and male, and I think he is still enough of a product of his time that he can't even conceive of himself being gay. I think Milliways will change this perception in the future, and I can see him experimenting if he finds a guy he's emotionally interested in. I think it's far to say he's demisexual, at least.
Sabine is cis and female. I'm not quite comfortable looking closely at her sex life (given she's a minor in my world) but I tend to lean towards gay or bisexual. I don't ship her with Ezra, at all, and really hope canon does not go there. (I do like fan canons that she is trans, but such is not the case with my head voice.)
Touji is cis and male. I've gotten mixed messages from canon as to his preferences. He's not the main character so hasn't had a romance quite yet. I'd lean towards bisexual.
Eliot is cis, male and very gay. He can appreciate the aesthetic of a female body, however. This will come into play at the end of season 01 but he will always be gay. I acknowledge the writers have reached a decision, but seeing as how it is a stupid ass decision, I will be changing it. You don't have a character being firmly gay for 11 episodes and then marry him off to a woman without complications or compromises. Granted those may come up in season 02.
Selina is cis and female. I can see a case for her being trans, but such is not the case with the voice in my head. She is also a minor, so not looking into her sex life. Comics canon has Selina being bisexual and I could see that for this Selina as well.
Izana is intersexed and third gender. This is canon. Right now they are androgynous, but in the future their body will shift to become more female to appeal to someone they fall in love with. Canon states they become female then, but I am ignoring this as I don't see a reason to erase their trans nature, nor their gender identity. I would have to say they are pan sexual.
How did I get so many queer peeps?
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Pam is all woman. And a vampire. So her sexual orientation isn't really relevant, she just has preferences. She does prefer sex with women and is attracted to them more than men. She won't have sex with men unless she thinks they're worth it, and she usually doesn't.
Floki is straight. For now. I say 'for now' because I think he gets confused about his love and loyalty toward Ragnar.
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My other current pups are cis and straight. ETA: except for D0G, who is a robot and only has a vague concept of sex and gender identity.
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Ava is very very cis, but she's also kind of a latent misandrist bisexual. IF YOU HAVE NOTICED THIS, THANK YOU. If you haven't, it's probably because I've been dropping subtle hints over the years but haven't managed to get her to actually acknowledge the fact.
I think Ava has managed to fly below the gaydar for so long because she's pretty repressed in general. And although she's ... kinda homophobic ... she's homophobic in a 2007 Midwestern kind of way, so when she vocalizes anything on the subject, it's usually, "Not that there's anything wrong with that because whatever, I don't care, is it hot in here??"
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Katya is female, and... I guess pansexual would be the best definition, her preferences don't lie along gender lines but on Light/Dark associations.
Oswin is female, and as pansexual as the word can possibly be stretched. Think Jack Harkness levels of 'why hello there'.
Bones is male, and straight - he likes the ladies, he just has horrible luck with them.
Glorfindel is male, and bi - though he just makes annoyingly bland faces at me when asked to elaborate.
Lin is female, and straight, though it'd be just as fair to say Tenzin-sexual, because she's never really quite gotten over him.
Jemma is female, and bi.
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When he thinks of himself, he thinks of himself as a man who likes women. Which mostly just shows that Eric compartmentalizes like a pro.
Elrond is male and old enough to not be too terribly concerned about sex. Emotional closeness is where it is at, and Celebrian is the who.
But he has seen things and felt things over the years and that is alright. Love is love.
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Legolas's gender identity doesn't match up with the "human" (1900s British) concept of male. He's asexual until such point as he encounters his forever-spouse (I follow the Tolkien letters that suggest Elves are only ever attracted to their opposite sex spouse), but he's bi/panromantic.
Quatre is as masculine as you can get, in his society. (Which makes me laugh, because outside of it he usually reads feminine, instead of "kind, empathetic patriarch". HE IS THE PATRIARCHY. /coughs.) He's pan, but if you asked he probably would answer by helpfully not answering. I also think he's not sure why it matters, when it's clearly Quatre/Trowa OTP forever.
Clint doesn't think of himself as traditionally masculine, though aesthetically he is. If he was born in a different context, he might ID as genderqueer but he mostly identifies as not-straight (which he foolishly conflates with gender). His sexuality has had major fluxes over his life (he identified as gay growing up, switched full force into LOL IM TOTALLY STRAIGHT, and then slowly found his sexuality's natural rattling point), but he's currently bisexual-mostly-male-attracted. I say bi instead of pan, because his attraction is heavily based on how you're playing your gender identity (and if that's interesting/hot *solemn*).
Darcy's sort of casually queer. Her gender identity is unexamined, and she hasn't put too fine a point in her sexuality beyond "well, I DEFINITELY have one". She's not sure how much her actual sexual encounters "count," because she's not interested in putting the effort in to self analyze. Basically, Darcy is gender identity: lazy, sexual identity: lazy, putting value on self introspection: expert.
Melinda is cis! She's THOUGHT ABOUT IT. She's pretty much straight, in a way I would classify as bi-mostly-male-attracted, but she feels weird acting like she's part of a group when she hasn't ever officially dated a woman, and she's atm not planning to date again ever.
Chuck's an unexamined mess, and unlike Darcy totally unaware there's examining to be done. I suspect he is cis, but I have no idea about sexuality because he's SO unpracticed at having feelings that his sudden maybe-crushes-maybe-friendships probably don't flag anything specific.
Sebastian is very straight!!! It's the only way I can't read him as just a total jerk in the play. So oblivious, bless. He's cool with being a guy? He's also cool with cross dressing for shenanigans, but that is not gender-driven.
Ugh the rest of them are so unexamined I'd just be repeating myself.
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Wellington Womble - unknown - all baby wombles are brought up communally in the womblegarten, so they don't really have named parents, and none are mentioned as being descended from the main cast. Assuming they reproduce sexually which, actually, there is not much evidence to suggest, he would likely be heterosexual, because of his IC character dynamic with Shansi.
Fry, Coral and Brooke - all too young to say (but I know roughly, Gil also).
Auxin - currently exploring sexuality with the boy next door, Alik. Likely either gay or bi.
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Viola is ??straight?? She's mostly straight. Probably. Though like Hotspur, if she were to mess around with a woman, she wouldn't see that as something that would define her or change her understanding of her sexuality, such as it is. She's also cis, though that's sort of a fraught question as she becomes increasingly comfortable with being Cesario. But at bottom, even as she enjoys the freedoms being a boy allows her and even though in many ways those freedoms allow her to be more herself, saying that she is a boy still fundamentally feels like a lie to her.
Marius is straight straight straight straight. Much as I deeply love the idea of him and Courfeyrac having something going on, I just do not see how anything queer could permeate his thick shell of prudish bourgie morality.
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Quentin is cis and bisexual, all Fae are per word of author who says they also have incredibly fluid ideas of gender. When you know someone who can turn into a cat, gender is another axis of transformation but Quentin reads a cis and masculine.
Charles is cis and bi and in love with Erik. Being bi for him is difficult as he's from a time when being gay was illegal and so he's not very open about it. He's far more open about being a mutant and telepath than that he finds men attractive. Milliways has allowed him more space to feel comfortable with that aspect of his identity.
William is cis and straight and would like someday to get married but for now, has all sorts of inferiority complexes due to the ideas of his era and being a manly enough person.
Sameth is cis and straight and still in love with Kait. He's also never really thought about it that much, other aspects of his identity such as his role in the Old Kingdom take up more space in his head.
Moist is cis and bi but he's happy to play around with gender in terms of outfits as he considers them all props to start with.
Jane is cis and straight and also has never thought about other options.
Ivan is cis and straight and learning to get over Barrayaran society's awful tendencies compared to more open ones in other parts of the galaxy.
Demeter is as cis as a goddess can be since she's so connected to fertility and straight as well. She admires women but her attraction is focused on men.
Tumnus is asexual and cis feels like an word to use for a faun since there are no female fauns. I don't know if I have the right words and I'm still recovering from a really long train ride.
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Raiden doesn't really rate sexuality in general. This is a mortal concern. He's fine with being male.
Sheogorath is a Daedroth, and as such wasn't assigned anything like a mortal gender at birth. He usually presents as male, but he certainly doesn't limit himself to it. To the extent that you can put a label on it, he's pansexual, but you really don't want to comprehend the prospect of sex with Sheogorath.
Cassie is cis and bi. She's a bit more comfortable getting with men than with other women - it's a matter of how she socializes and the sorts of crowds she runs with. I've pretty much had to derive this on my own, as canon doesn't provide any big clues or obvious canonical pairings. The most common fan pairing I've seen is with Jacqui, but this isn't canon and I get WAY more of a sisterly vibe from their relationship. (I mean, seriously - Jacqui's middle name is Sonya and they've known each other since they were literal babies. They are family). I've seen Cassie/Erron Black work, but my favorite Cassie ship I've ever seen was a fic that paired her with Orchid from the Killer Instinct series.
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Kylo is male and doesn't really think about the sex too much. I don't know if he's asexual or just really busy.
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Furiosa is cis-female. She thinks more about trust than love or attraction. Sex is a commodity in her world, and not something she treats casually when she has the choice. Post-canon, she trusts Max and they respect each other, but it would only become love if he stuck around. Without him, she's got other things to worry about.
Sherlock is cis-male, ace or demisexual. He basically considers himself Jim-sexual: when he says he doesn't want anyone but Jim he's not just being poetic, it's the literal truth.
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i cherish the idea of a survival au where him, cosette, and courfeyrac come to some kind of Arrangement, but alas ;__;
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Andrew: cis male and definitely bi, something he has realized since first coming to Milliways. (Sometime in the first year of the game I described his sexuality as "primarily confused".)
Simon: cis male, straight.
Charlie: cis female, prooobably straight but never particularly examined that. Had very strongly repressed her sexuality because of its sensory cross-wiring with her pyrokinesis, prior to her sadly short-lived relationship with Prometheus.
Cavilo: cis female, bi with a stronger leaning towards men -- although her sex life tends to be governed less by who she's into and more by who's into her and could conceivably be manipulated thereby. (I am inclined to think that she thinks of men as easier to fool.)
Kali: female (I am not sure cis quite applies to a god), bi/pansexual. No, she has never had sex with the god Pan.
Nepeta: again not sure cis applies because we don't have a clear idea of how gender is constructed on Alternia, but assuming a reasonable correlation, cis female. Monosexuality isn't an Alternian concept, so probably bi but has never particularly examined that.
Edgar: cis male, and I have literally no idea what his sexuality is. I've millicanoned that at one point in his early teens he was in a brief relationship with a girl, but that isn't particularly diagnostic.
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Bahorel is into Experiences, and doesn't much worry about whether those are from men or women or really hot architecture. He knows he's definitely a man, but he has spent time considering or believing himself to be other identities, including one weekend where he was certain he was a spider and kept dropping things he meant to be grabbing with his other legs, and one very annoying hour when he thought he was writing-desk and so of course couldn't move on his own. (Stay in school don't do drugs,kids.) But being a guy is the easy default mode and really how he thinks about himself when he's not purposely altering his brain.
Gringoire appreciates the aesthetic of romances, and would enjoy essentially being an actor in one that met his Aesthetic Standards. But on the whole, he'd rather have a nice non-euphemistic sandwich.
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I don't know how the Kharidian gods reproduce either, or why the Kharidians where the only gods who reproduced, but... Amascut is unabashedly female whatever species she pretends to be. She has intimate anatomical knowledge of many species and she chooses hot sexy female every time.
Everyone in canon refers to her with feminine pronouns, so it's not like anyone would question her about it anyhow.
One odd quirk, though. Her animal aspect is the lioness, but always a maned lioness. I almost have no reason to mention it, but biologists have been finding prides protected by maned lionesses instead of actual lions in the real world and the research on how those prides work has been interesting. But then again, that was a part of Amascut's past that she violently rejects now, so I can't really play with that idea much. Her mental health issues complicate things, as always.
Throw in the fact that gender changing magic is an actual thing in canon and ... the cis/trans binary isn't an actual binary, just something the world has to work with.
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Shephard is cis, male, and straight. He does not particularly want to hear about other people's sexuality. He is at this point of roughly the same opinion as Commander Badass in Manly Guys Doing Manly Things: it's not his business what anyone else has in their pants if they're not someone whose pants he is seriously hoping to get into, and it is also not his business what said someone else is doing with what they have in their pants.
Stacker Pentecost is cis, male, and up until now I had assumed his orientation was I AM TOO BUSY TO HAVE TIME FOR THIS RIGHT NOW, but since John Boyega's been tapped to play his son in the PacRim sequel, he obviously did something somewhere along the line. For all I know he made a gene bank contribution just in case the first Jaegers irradiated him to the point where he couldn't reproduce naturally. Gonna wait and see.
Fawkes is physiologically externally asexual; Vault 87-strain FEV canonically results in the destruction of external physical sexual characteristics. Not sure if that means things wind up being resorbed or if there's something nastier involved. Either way Fawkes does not remember having a gender assignment or a sexuality, and chose the name Fawkes because of a database entry on Guy Fawkes. Fawkes was a man before the FEV infection, but given the amount of genetic rewriting the virus does and the complete lack of pre-virus memory outside of Conversations With Dead People incidents, he does not consider this especially relevant. Is there such a thing as trans-ace/trans-agender?
Quicksilver is cis, male, and... probably het. He's not entirely sure and he's not good at interacting socially, so he's still working on sorting the possibilities out.
Varric is cis, male, and primarily interested in the ladies on-camera, but happily flirts with anything that catches his attention. I don't know how much of that is just to see the reaction. I assume he's bi, with a Kinsey score of 1 or 2.
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