Suggestions

I like Fiona for what she is, not because she's trans. If anyone trying to tell me that her representation is more important than her character, I'd feel it's a disrespect towards her.

Tbh, why are we still trying to ask for cardboard 'representations'? If being lgbt+ is what people are, why can't we just see them as everyone else, as another fellow being? Why do we need to have 'representation' for the sake of representation and bring them to the spotlight? While having NPCs that include a wide range of rainbow spectrum is great, we certainly do not need to have them simply to 'fill' a quota. If our next NPC is lgbt+, great, if not, great as well. The more important thing is what they, as their characters, can bring/add to the game in the sense of game mechanism. Not what/who they are dating.

I like the idea on the condition that having a couple fits with an idea that the staff already has and not, like many in the forum are concerned about, representation just for representation’s sake. An idea that works well with having a couple and then what if they were the same gender? And done. Also if it is subtle and the characters aren’t stereotyped. I’m not worried about that from FR, but it is important to mention. It doesn’t need to be anything but a throwaway line or staff confirming it so I doubt it would be too hard to make it not tokenized or in-your-face. I’m all for more queer representation. I give this a slice of support.

Just throwing in my two cents here:

I love how Fiona is handled and Murkydepths' description for how to do more representation sounds awesome!

I'm trans and bi and I live in an area that's not particularly accepting of my existence. This is probably silly, but small bits of positive representation like Fiona mean the world to me. It's like a tiny daily reminders that other people in the world see me as a human being and not some evil abomination.

I would prefer that NPCs who are there to serve an in-game purpose weren't boiled down entirely to their gender or sexuality. It's insulting at best.

Fiona is more than just an extra pair of feelers. She's a familiar collector and she needs our help tending to her flock. The gender aspect is secondary, and easily viewed in a picture, without the site going "Hey! Look! We're repping! Look! Look at our representation! Look how good we are!"

It's small, concise, important and gets across what they want to get across about her with a simple character design.

I'm not sure how they could do the same with sexuality without the character basically oversharing all over its in-game function. Weirdly, when I meet people out in the wild, the first thing they say isn't HI I'M GAY. I sure don't either.

I don't want to see forced representation in site-function based NPCs unless it's done in a way that's viewable without looking like an obvious attempt to shoe-horn in diversity.

If aspects like that were included in a relevant context where the occasionally added stories are concerned, like the collection that was posted a while ago, I'd be all for it. Something like sexuality is a tell, not a show. You can't really tell people about it like with our current NPCs because of limited space or because it's just not something that would come up in the context of what they're doing.

Give a story-based NPC a same-sex partner, that'd work in a comment, a passive detail or a plot point. Include a story about a pair of gay dragons adopting an egg.

We don't need a page of NPCs like "Hello, I'm Dave! I'm a transgender pansexual Nocturne with an anxiety disorder and I'm here to make Coliseum potions for you all!"

It's just bad storytelling. And it makes the entire community look like a bunch of oversharers, which ... most of us really aren't.

By all means have more representation, but do it properly. Representation is not the same as tokenism and what differs is the method by and intent of which you represent.

[quote name="Greyjoy" date="2020-02-18 17:22:52" ] I would prefer that NPCs who are there to serve an in-game purpose weren't boiled down entirely to their gender or sexuality. It's insulting at best. ---- It's small, concise, important and gets across what they want to get across about her with a simple character design. I'm not sure how they could do the same with sexuality without the character basically oversharing all over its in-game function. Weirdly, when I meet people out in the wild, the first thing they say isn't HI I'M GAY. I sure don't either. [/quote] They would have a purpose, but my suggestion isn't for a new trading function. I don't think you have to worry about mods adding dragons with no purpose. And how to do with sexuality? Have two dragons in one area. Confirm they're dating in a mod post. That's just as small as Fiona's antennae and her mod post.

@MurkyDepths

... ah. The Dumbledore method. Word of God instead of anything of real substance. That's a pretty low bar, then.

They could easily just go "oh yeah, swipp adopted some eggs with his husband Clarence."

And I'm not concerned about mods adding dragons with no purpose. I'm concerned about mods adding dragons with a purpose and then giving them details irrelevant to their purpose hidden in a modpost that we're supposed to take as representation and be happy about it.

There's a reason Rowling gets panned for it.

@Shannieann

You're absolutely right, of course ... but I just don't give JK Rowling that much credit. That, and she's a good example to use of what not to do.

The issue with it isn't the lack of content in the books. I don't expect books about schoolkids fighting evil to have a massive focus on the private lives of the teachers or peripheral characters unless it's relevant (like ... Tonks and Remus, for better of for worse). You could view the thing between Dumbledore and Grindelwald as subtext if you choose to interpret it that way, but it's never relevant -- they were friends as far as Harry was concerned. Harry would never have known anyway, unless he'd seen it in memories. It was fine for it not to come up.

It's the fact that she said "Oh yeah, he was gay the whole time" despite it never coming up that's the issue. She's done it with other things too -- apparently there was one Jewish kid in Hogwarts -- but it never comes up either. It's fine for religions/cultures of random kids and sexualities of teachers to never be in Harry's viewpoint, it's fine for us to never be privy to that. We're following Harry, not a soap opera.

The issue I have with it, and the issue a lot of people who want real representation in media have with it, is that it's very easy and very cheap for an author to go "Oh yeah [random character] was [unseeable minority]" for clout. It's not representation, it's self-backpatting. There's no effort there at all, they just want to look good without doing anything 'controversial'. It's on the other end of the scale to adding a caricature or stereotype and just as bad and lazy.

That's how it would be with a "Oh yeah [fr npc] is gay" would be in a modpost. No effort. No real representation except for a comment by the writer. Or for them to overshare about something my dragons would never need to know within the confines of a brief interaction at the trading post.

It'd be like somebody turning around and going "Oh yeah, Thor was bi throughout all the Marvel films." and expecting congrats for being progressive.

The method by which representation is shown is really important. If it's a throwaway comment, or if we only have the word of a writer to go on, it's not the same as having a female character in a story with a wife who mentions her casually the way a straight woman would mention her husband. Maybe the wife is never met. Maybe she stays at home and raises chickens and the character only mentions her in passing or thinks about her in the non-dialogue prose. That's still representation in a good way. It normalises things without either making a massive deal of it, making it the only personality point the character has, or just saying it's the case after the fact and expecting us to be happy.

I desperately want representation in more stuff, including FR, but I'd prefer not to be expected to be happy with cheap attempts. That's why Fiona is so great. It's there, it's out, it's subtle and it's just an aspect of her as a person, but the entire thing she's about. If other people are okay with a mod note well, they can do them, but I'm too old and grouchy to be okay with sexuality being a footnote only added to make the writers look better and appease the masses.

It's a fine line, but it's possible to walk it.