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Character Genders

Chibi Pika

Stay positive
So we were having a discussion about whether you're more or less likely to write your first protagonist as sharing the same gender as yourself (basically whether or not you can guess someone's gender based on the protagonist of their first fic), and I thought I'd bring it here!

So, to everyone: did your first written protagonist have the same gender as you? If not, was it out of a conscious decision to try something unfamiliar, or did you just not really think about it all that much? Have your characters since then skewed toward one end of the gender spectrum or the other, or anywhere in-between? Do you tend to prefer writing characters of one gender over another, or ever experimentally gender-swap a character to see if it works better? And lastly, did your confidence with writing characters of an unfamiliar gender change at all as you got older/more experienced?
 

M-Dub

Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω ᾿Αχιλῆος
Curiously, my fics' casts are significantly weighted towards the female, but all of my protagonists are male. I'm not sure what it is, really; it's not that I can't or don't like to write female characters, because I can and I do. Maybe there's just some unconscious concern about being able to really get inside their heads in the way that you'd expect for a protagonist.
 

Griff4815

No. 1 Grovyle Fan
My first written protagonist was most definitely the same gender as me, especially considering that he was pretty much a modified self-insert. xD To be honest, I mostly wrote male characters early on in my writing career. My first female characters in my first Pokemon story, Never in the Wrong Time or Wrong Place, were pretty bland and I didn't really know how to write them.

It wasn't until a couple years after, when I did some Digimon RPs here in Serebii, that I became more comfortable writing female characters. I would say that many of my characters still happen to be male, but now I think I'm pretty comfortable writing female characters. I don't know why I had such a mental block at the beginning. Now I just write them like they're any other character, as I would a male one. Maybe it's because, as I've written more and more characters, I've been able to empathise with more diverse types of characters outside of my own personal reference pool. So, yeah, I would say that as I grew out of being a teenager and became an adult, I've been able to write more diverse and more complex female characters.

I can't say I've ever tried to gender swap a character since, when I conceive a character in my head, they're stuck with the gender that I immediately think of them as, which is why all of the Royal Knights in my Digimon stories are male. However, I've been trying to add more female characters to counteract that.
 

Starlight Aurate

Just a fallen star
Personally, yes, the first protagonist I ever wrote about was a girl.

My situation, unfortunately, is that I wanted the protagonist to be me--I wanted to write myself into the story (and it didn't go well lol. I was about 12). And even with the main story I'm writing now, the protagonist for that is a female too. I wanted that because, being a woman, I felt more comfortable with writing from that mindset, and I wasn't all too confident that I could write from a guys' perspective.

I have branched out a bit over the years; many one-shots I've written feature males as protagonists, and in Drowning I've been taking the POV from male characters more frequently. I can't say that I prefer writing for one gender over another; I think it depends on the situation. I think that for coming-of-age stories, I prefer to write from male perspective. I've definitely become more comfortable with writing from male perspectives over time, too.
 

Ambyssin

Winter can't come soon enough
Well, this is my first fic, and I made the main duo one guy and one girl. Yes, the guy gets a bit more focus. But I actually inverted the genders from what I feel like people stereotypically choose for those Pokémon species (i.e. people tend to make Vulpixes female, and Riolus male, so I flipped it). I'd like to think my cast is pretty well split between males and females (the villains are an even split, for sure). But, then again, I did arbitrarily assign genders to genderless Pokémon... so I guess that's bad? *shrug*
 

Blackjack Gabbiani

Clearly we're great!
I don't think I've ever written an agender character aside from brief lines for Gogo in Final Fantasy 6 fics that I wrote like 20 years ago.
 

roule

take it all or leave it... I Feel You
I always end up writing female main characters, so I guess I'm writing from experience :p
 

Mrs. Lovett

Rolling writer
When I was little, I'd always write about female main characters and never about males. Being a girl, I felt most comfortable and most interested in writing about girls, whereas I had no interest in writing about guys and thought that that all writers just stuck to their own :p. I guess it's natural to do that when you're young, since you're most likely to start from the place where you feel most comfortable and not set up extra obstacles for yourself. But I'm sure there are other people who've done otherwise. (Actually, I think one of the first stories I ever wrote was about the planets of the solar system, and I think I either made them all guys or completely disregarded gender entirely xPP Let's just say that when I wrote about human characters, they were always girls.)

Then as I grew older, as a few people have said already, I gradually grew more comfortable with writing about guys, and also started to write about them more. Roots was actually the first long, serious story I dedicated to a male main character, and by then it already felt more or less natural to be writing about one. It helped, of course, that the character was a kid and my age wasn't too far away from his. But my experience was still overwhelmingly with female main characters at the time, so Roots helped me balance out my skills.

Now, I love writing about male characters just as much as about female characters and am generally confident in my ability to get into a guy character's head. I can use a male character to express an aspect of my personality just as well as a female character could.

I generally like it when my stories are equally balanced, though, with around as many prominent female characters as male characters. There's no particular reason for it, I just feel like a story's more fun that way.

With regards to pokemon, I give all of them a gender, even the legendaries. I see the genderlessness as just a game mechanic implemented for a specific purpose (so that the player can't breed Celebi to get a million more), whereas from a realistic, in-story perspective, the only pokemon that I could imagine being truly genderless are ones like Deoxys or Ditto. But that's just me.
 

straydelta

Noodlebirb
The majority of my protagonists are all women. It did take me time, at first, to write something other than what I knew, and to realize that guys are just people, too. But even still, I mainly write female protagonists. When it comes to the rest of my characters, it can be pretty varied; male, female, agender, nonbinary - it all depends on what I'm writing. But I don't really see any need to make male protagonists most of the time. Especially in Pokémon, since I feel that there are plenty already. It's not really that I feel less comfortable with writing men; I'm just extraordinarily tired of seeing so much of media lacking in female representation. Be the change you want to see, and all that.

(I mean, I basically complain way too much about the lack of female superheroes and women in Transformers to start writing stories with male leads.)
 

Dragonfree

Just me
Wow, this thread feels a little like stepping into bizarroville, haha.

I'm a woman, but even as a kid, the overwhelming majority of my stories were about boys/men. Lengthy serialized dramatic games? Guys. Casual kid role-playing? Guys. Stuffed animals? Guys. It was really ingrained in me that stories were about boys - the kinds of stories I liked, anyway, where there were high stakes and people died, not just friends having sleepovers. Instead, I'd often insert a girl supporting character and promptly make her clearly superior to the bland boy main character. The Quest for the Legends, started when I was twelve, is literally this setup, except by this point I was starting to get interested in characters being messed up and having issues, so the girl became clearly superior But Also With Issues.

The gender ratios of my characters in general skewed very heavily male until I started to make a conscious effort to correct that; it was pretty much the standard male-as-default thing, where unless there was a particular reason I wanted it to be a girl, I'd just automatically make it a guy. I didn't think about it at all until I was... in my late teens, probably? It's a little bizarre. In any case, after I did start to think about it, I began to consciously genderswap characters in my head before writing them in to see if I preferred them that way, which ended up being a lot of the time. I think the gender ratios are reasonably even by now, but it took a while and a lot of conscious effort to get there. Maybe if I'd grown up with more equal media things would have been different; I did own at least some books I loved with female protagonists, but they were a drop in the sea next to all the men.
 
Well, you nailed it on the head for me. My first five fics all had female protagonists, with only a single cancelled fic of mine using a male protagonist. I think I unintentionally write females more out of the characters I’m naturally interested in from the games, but it may also be some subconscious gender bias on my part.

Interestingly, though, my current fic The Back Alleys of Ecruteak (which I’ll update soon I’m sorry ;_;) currently runs on a male protagonist, although I intend on introducing two females and three males next chapter. I’m also planning a new one-shot entirely centred around Riley, which is a first for me.
 
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DeliriousAbsol

Call me Del
Thinking about it, I guess I probably veer towards writing a main character of the same gender as me. But I don't really mind either way. It really depends on how the character develops in my mind. Given The End's huge main character cast, they were rather mixed. System:Reboot is the first big story I've written with a prominent male MC. In fact, most of the MC cast is mainly male XD

Regards swapping a character's gender to see what works better, I did do that in The End. The supporting character Mint was originally an unnamed male grovyle. But I changed them to a female to demonstrate Enigma's malicious side a bit better. It worked so much, the ended up being given a name and coming back as a supporting character rather than a random unnamed one-off.

However... Minus not knowing what gender Harlequin was going to be and going mentally back and forth on the idea until I finally decided (many... many... chapters in) I don't think I've really tried to change the gender of a more main character. (And I don't think I could do that to Macro... XD )
 

NovaBrunswick

Canada Connoisseur
When I was younger, many of my characters were girls, with very few boys. Fast-forward to today and it's now the opposite, with more boys than girls. I blame Canada having more masculine-sounding place names than feminine-sounding ones. XD
 

Manchee

extra toasty
(basing this off of The Sapphire Story, even though it's not technically my "first written protagonist" it's my first serious attempt at writing something)

My first protagonist who was introduced did end up being male, like myself, but only a few pages into that same chapter I had my other protagonist introduced who was female. They're based off of Brendan and May from the games, and I introduced the Brendan character first because he was the one of the two who was moving to Hoenn and I liked how that started off the fic exactly where it started in the games I was basing the fic off of. Even now as I try to rewrite that story, I'm starting it with him (not in the same scene, though) because I like the image and tone it sets with him having to move to a new region because of his parents' decision.

At the time of writing and posting new chapters of that fic, I did tend to write more male characters. I for sure felt more comfortable writing them, but most were based on characters in the games, so it was hard to avoid it (looking back I could have gender-bent characters, though I never thought of it) and I ended up with caricatures of NPCs like the guy in Petalburg Forest looking for a Shroomish or the guy in Littleroot who didn't let you leave the town until you visited your neighbor. As I wrote the fic, though, I feel like I focused more on my May character than anyone else. I was conscious even of how I listed my characters in descriptions, and I made it a point to always describe my main characters as "Kira and Cole," so that her name was always first.

When it comes to more current writing, my biggest writing aspiration has an even distribution of male-female protagonists, and that was a conscious thought to do that. I also have firmly chosen to start with a female narrator because I feel that it is very important in a work of novels such as this one. Even looking at my NaNo piece from a few months ago, I have two main characters, one male and one female. Granted, the male character has a lot more page time, but the female character is instrumental in moving the story forward, so... that's something I would like to rewrite in edits, because I like having a male-female duo as main characters and giving them equal weight within the story.

I actually feel like it is easier for me currently to think of female characters. I think it's a name thing, because I know I am way more picky when it comes to male names, and if I get stuck on naming someone, I tend to work on other areas of writing until I can think of or find a name that I like. I don't think confidence has anything to do with writing female characters for me... I have three younger sisters, and my mom was more of a parent than my dad, so I should have a good understanding of females to some people, but I don't think I can portray them as well as I can portray a male character since I've spent my whole life as a male and understand the world best through a male lens. The biggest thing that has changed is trying to be aware of that in writing and not writing from that male lens, because it is a pretty boring lens when it comes down to it.

Gender-bending a character is something I would like to try. I've just never really though of it. I know what characters I need in a situation, or what characters I would like to write, and in most cases I think switching their gender would not do much. But I'd like to try, because I'm sure I'll prove myself wrong and find a bunch of changes it causes and I would like to challenge myself in writing a character that isn't perfectly easy just because I've given them the gender that I want them to have. An agender character is one that I've really wanted to try writing, too, and I've had this idea to try writing in a character but giving them no descriptions that "give away" a gender at all, and only referring to them as "they/them/etc." Not sure how it would go over, but it's something that I would be more curious to see how people picture them, and if it is more based on the gender of the reader, something I said or had the character did, or something else.
 

Cometstarlight

What do I do now?
Oh yeah, definitely. A lot of my starting main characters in my stories were female. Like many have stated in the thread before, it's not that I hate male characters, it's just that I was afraid that I wouldn't do them justice/not write them correctly, seeing as that I've never been a dude. I don't want to write a dude that comes off as too feminine or indecisive. As a way to try and change that, I decided to just randomly sketch a new OC, but one that was a boy. Once I had something, I just kept hammering out his design over and over again with slight variations until I found him. Not sure whether I should keep him as a kid or age him up to a teen, but it was a great exercise in creating/writing a character that had a Y in his chromosomes lol
 
Y'know, it's interesting. My first story, Convergence, had a male protagonist. A bunch of the stuff I have in the works? All male protags. And yes, I can confirm, I am male myself.

But the most interesting protagonist I've ever written? Female.

I don't know what it is that's so different about Mattie than a bunch of the other main characters I've written thus far, but she's just so much more fleshed out than all the other one's I've written combined. And there's also a bunch of the one-shots I've written over the years. A lot of my best work involves female protagonists.

I think, though, that my deal with Mattie is a little more complicated than others. She was actually born (in a way) out of a failed fic that I only ever wrote the first chapter of, called Talking Points. It's on the site, so it's there for all to see. The protagonist there, Casey Marlow, was also female, but something just wasn't resonating with her that isn't an issue with Mattie. When thinking about it, I've come to an interesting conclusion: the gender of the character doesn't necessarily make it easier or harder, it's how you flesh out what's going on in their head. A lot of people on the thread thus far have mentioned sort of shying away from protagonists of the opposite gender due to a lack of confidence in getting into the headspace of a character of a different gender (and sexual orientation can also play a huge factor in this). For me, though, Mattie was a person first, which made writing her somewhat less tricky. I'm not saying I didn't originally assign her a gender, she was female from the beginning, but it's not the only thing about her, and thus I don't really get as hung up on it. I'm not sure if she comes off as a little more masculine or something, and I don't think she does, and that's not the intent, but I think of her as a person and a character with a backstory and a life she's lived, not just a female protagonist.

Sorry, rambling, but I hope that made sense. (God I need sleep.)
 

Samayouru

Rabid Dusclops Fan
You know, I've written quite a few protagonists over the years and I've found that I actually enjoy writing with male protagonists more than female despite being a girl myself.

I think a lot of it stems from how I act. I'm not very feminine, and while I can definitely write female characters it has to take a little more effort because to me in real life girls don't make that much sense. I know how to flesh out male characters better because I know and recognise the traits that men generally share better than girls. Phalanx above summed it up quite well when it comes to male protags for me: I see them as people first. It's girls that I really have to study. :p
 

bobandbill

Winning Smile
Staff member
Super Mod
I think I have had a slight tendency towards male protagonists, although my first fic was based on a game with a male protagonist, so that was determined outside of my own choosing.

My last fic I need to revive has a female protagonist and that was simply because when I had the idea for the story she was the character that popped up in my head. Although on the flip side an early comment from a beta reader had been that she didn't read like a female, which was something I had to work on.
 

Cutlerine

Gone. Not coming back.
All trans women, all the way down.

So uh yeah, probably you can guess my gender pretty easily from the stories that I write. There aren't a lot of stories about people like me compared to the number of stories about people who aren't like me, so a couple of years ago I was kinda just like okay, whatever, I'll just write exclusively about these people, then. But like, before I started doing that, I basically just alternated between male and female protagonists, if I remember correctly, both in fic and in my other writing. I can't remember why. Habit, I guess.

I guess I'm sort of repeating points already made above, but I feel like it's not so hard to get into the headspace of a character of a different gender to yourself, so long as you approach the problem as "what's this person like?" rather than "how does a man/woman/nonbinary person/etc think?" I've read more novels than I need to by men who have clearly taken the latter approach rather than the former, and have ended up writing women who feel like someone trying to theorise what a woman is from incomplete data sets, rather than human beings. People are, generally speaking, people. Sometimes things happen to complicate that, and that might be where you need to do some research, depending on your level of familiarity with what you're trying to write, but it's a good point to start from when trying to figure a character out.
 

Kein

AKA Silktree
I'm writing my first fanfic now, and will be doing that for probably a few years. The perspective alternates between two protagonists: a boy (Ernest) and a girl (Kris from Crystal). I'll admit that they have a fair bit in common in terms of their inner thoughts, but I think of Ernest as having higher IQ and Kris as having higher EQ. So that, rather than the genders specificially, makes it a bit easier for me to identify with Ernest (I'm male). That said, I'd like to think that my EQ is fine and it helps that I'm close to my mom and aunt, not just for Kris' maternal side but for certain other characters.
 
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