So I'm finally getting around to planning that RPG, and I want some cultures with rigid gender norms that do not at all line up with the male/female binary (mostly to bludgeon cis players over the head with gender-non-conforming feelings).
I'm curious if y'all have ideas!
For instance:
1. The Classical Elements are the genders, you get assigned an Element based on your parents' Elements; each has a dress code, stereotypes, social roles, etc
2. Dwarves are agender and comedically bad at gender expectations. I think they might also reproduce by carving children out of stone together
@aprrrl I once decided for an RPG that dwarves reproduced socially. They don't have gender roles, and the colony will semi-regularly just have giant sex parties and any resulting children are cared for collectively without any real focus on specific parents.
@starkatt I love it
"dwarves aren't 'a grumpy people,' you just interrupted their regularly-scheduled community orgy"
@aprrrl Dunno if you've read the Ancillary series, but one of the primary cultures in it doesn't have gender. In one of the books, a character from another culture asks "but how do you have kids??" to which the very sensible reply was "You go see a doctor and get the necessary adjustments made."
@starkatt I love that! I only read the first one and I loved how it basically left the characters gender as something you'd have to infer from their actions, rather than a label
@aprrrl You should definitely read the next two -- they expand on the themes in really interesting ways.
Also I think it's a mistake to try and assign gender to Radachi at all. Despite that, my brain kept trying really hard to do so.
I wish in the first Leckie hadn't given signifiers that people latch on to as representative as gender/sex, and my reading of the subtext of later books is that she even regrets having done so.
@starkatt Yes, I wouldn't assign genders to the genderless characters -- it was the fact that the narrator was eliding genders of characters from gendered societies that I was thinking of, if I recall the book correctly. I liked that :)