💾 Archived View for yujiri.xyz › storytelling › choosing-gender.gmi captured on 2023-04-19 at 23:10:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Two considerations. First of all, in-story diversity is good, including in-group diversity. If there are two factions of goodguys and two characters from each, default to each one having one male and one female.
Second, and more insightfully, *use cultural double-standards to pick*.
Sometimes a cultural double standard exists such that the audience's opinion of a character will vary based on their gender. For example, it's a widespread stereotype that when there's a conflict of "justice versus mercy" or "anger versus compassion", men favor justice and women favor compassion.
This means that when people see a man arguing for the justice side in one of these situations, they're more likely to write him off with "well he's a guy, of course he's going to err on the side of being too harsh", even if only subconsciously.
Therefore, if you want to make a story that challenges our culture's insane "turn the other cheek" ideology, it's probably a good idea to make the didactic character female. Likewise to challenge the total reversal of that standard that appears in the context of government where mercy and giving a repentant criminal a chance to redeem himself cease to exist, make the character male.