Roleplay Across the Gender Line

[bothers]

Yeah, the ultra-sexualised imagery is so depressing. I follow a few Tumblrs that repost character art, and for every 30 or so stripper-with-a-sword portraits, there'll be 1 or 2 reasonable ones. The artists of those immediately go on my Deviant Art/Artstation follows, similar to Astra's strategy.

I'm not above cropping the salacious bits out of a picture if it's possible, like the ones where you've got a woman wearing sensible clothing or body armour on her top half, but just lingerie and heels on the bottom. I don't have much compunction about cropping that stuff out, though finding pictures that were reasonable to begin with is definitely a better strategy!

[farothel]

I've been able to find good and realistic pictures quite quickly these days, with only search terms as 'pathfinder female paladin' or similar (depending on the class I need).

[Silk]

I wholeheartedly agree with the difficulty of finding pics of female characters not in a bikini. I feel lucky to have found a pic of a woman in plate mail while still looking beautiful and even noble looking for my character Sara who is in fact a noble.

You know, I think it would be a good idea for someone to start a thread where everyone can put all their links and pic's into one thread for future use by the community as a whole.

What do you think?

[Ziether]

Originally Posted by Silk

I wholeheartedly agree with the difficulty of finding pics of female characters not in a bikini. I feel lucky to have found a pic of a woman in plate mail while still looking beautiful and even noble looking for my character Sara who is in fact a noble.

You know, I think it would be a good idea for someone to start a thread where everyone can put all their links and pic's into one thread for future use by the community as a whole.

What do you think?

I do so lament the passing of the char-portraits Tumblr page. That was a great place for sensible female fantasy character art.

[Marshmallow]

Originally Posted by bothers

Yeah, the ultra-sexualised imagery is so depressing. I follow a few Tumblrs that repost character art, and for every 30 or so stripper-with-a-sword portraits, there'll be 1 or 2 reasonable ones. The artists of those immediately go on my Deviant Art/Artstation follows, similar to Astra's strategy.

This is an area of weird conflict for me, I'm pretty bored of the overly-sexy fantasy stuff, but at the same time I can't entirely deny the pull of my own sexuality, like, who doesn't want to play a character they find attractive, either aesthetically or in a more physical sense?

Even if you're playing an objectively 'ugly' character, odds are you'll choose a look, outfit or aesthetic that is to some variant of taste to you. It's pretty annoying, but then again, I don't indulge in the Fantasy genre much nowadays, it's either too boring, safe & samey or it's stupidly edgy, ridiculous & can't handle any of its own subject matters; But that's not the focus of this thread. :P

Originally Posted by bothers

I'm not above cropping the salacious bits out of a picture if it's possible, like the ones where you've got a woman wearing sensible clothing or body armour on her top half, but just lingerie and heels on the bottom. I don't have much compunction about cropping that stuff out, though finding pictures that were reasonable to begin with is definitely a better strategy!

I've got a good number of friends who are artists and a lot of the time their signatures get cropped out due to stuff like this, so I couldn't do that personally; But each their own, if it works for you, it works.

[bothers]

Oh yeah, I do borrow portraits for characters that I find attractive. I just prefer them to be wearing a full complement of activity-appropriate clothing while they're doing the being attractive

That's a good point on cropping out signatures, that'll suck for artists. I try to avoid taking images from pinterest/google image search, so that I know artists' names and can credit them with a link to the full-size image on their own page/site. I'd definitely like to see better crediting of artist's work all round, whether it's cropped/resized or not.

[clockwork]

I've played male, female, and even dabbled in a few nonbinary characters. Having an interesting concept, personality, or something along those lines is a bigger factor to me than gender, it may sound odd but at some point in a character's creation, it's about discovering like details like that rather than deciding on them yourself.

[Jennifer]

Amazing, this thread started 10 years ago.

As for character art, I have to admit it is difficult to find renderings that I like that are not overly sexualized; unless I play a male character. Which I've done once or twice. The problem is, for me, playing a male gives me too much cognitive dissonance and knocks me out of the narrative.

[Unko Talok]

I'm really late to this response, and this may have already been posted in this thread-- but you may be interested, Jennifer, in the Reasonable Fantasy subreddit. With a major negative that it's not easily searchable for art.

EDIT: Yes, Wyn posted it here!

[briar]

There's no such thing as a 'late response' to this topic. It's a constant and ever-evolving topic that is good to continue discussing. To add to the discussion of character art, I've actually found Pinterest's listing feature to be quite helpful.

Basically, I made a board with about 6-10 images that I found just through searches of female characters in reasonable or logical, non-sexualized armor, then went into the list itself and used the "Find Some Ideas for this Board" function at the bottom of the list. Granted, this isn't a perfect system, and you'll still have to pick and choose, but it's enough of a filter that I generally seem to get more good character art than bad.