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#it doesn't mean those things are structural. many people can have limited imaginations without society imposing strictures.
essektheylyss · 2 years
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Honestly, the way Aabria talks about Laerryn making out with the entire Ring of Brass just makes me think, as I have often, that it is well past time this fandom actually acknowledged that the people building and playing in Exandria as a world are not conceptualizing it as one in which (to use a colloquialism, but it extends also to gender as well as sexuality) straight is the default.
People have been saying for years that it would be fantastic if fantasy worldbuilding actually acknowledged how ridiculous it is to have magical worlds with shapechangers and transmutation in which hetero- and amato- and cisnormativity are still the norm. Yet it feels like fandom still wants to apply that lens to a world that has not operated as such for quite a while, even if it may have started out as such simply because the creator(s) had not yet interrogated it.
I think a lot of the discussion about queer characters in Critical Role would be simpler if we approached it from the understanding that there often isn't a reason for sexuality or gender to be an issue in Exandria, and the isolated incidents where it might cause conflict narratively are not operating under the basis that that prejudice exists structurally. This has been how Matt has discussed many cultures there, how Aabria seems to approach both worldbuilding and character creation, and honestly how most if not all of the players have increasingly seemed to respond to the world—with an assumption that the most common way this could come up in gameplay, flirting with other characters, is not going to be met with any hostility on the basis of perceived sexuality or gender, either within the cast or in the world.
This is, I think, important to recognize as a fandom, because if we don't, we're going to unwittingly continue to reintroduce these same insidious real-world structures into a setting that gives the impression of having been deliberately crafted and expanded over time to imagine a world without them.
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