Older wank, but still tasty.
Misogyny wrapped in status quo and covered with a layer of fully missing the point, as recovered from the back of the wank_report refrigerator.

theriversea was an up-and-coming roleplay community centered around genderswap themes. While it's since been deleted (due to disinterest or shame, we're not sure which),

pikabot has a preserved version of its description along with an analysis of why the setting concept is a little...troubling.

The device was damaged; the scientests, killed. The remaining Amazon forces have no choice, but to use the device as it is.

With the genetic identifiers no longer working, the portal no longer has the ability to pick out only women; now it takes everyone, and changes them. Genetic identitification has become genetic modification.

The men become women: Amazons.

The women become men: slaves.

So basically it's still an enslaved-female setting, it's just that everyone's genitals get swapped around before they get there. It seems a bizarre and slightly pointless concept. But the problematic fun really gets going once an ad for the comm is posted to

rp_anon_meme. People jump on the idea as misogynist and basically maintaining the same gender roles with a slight alteration of anatomy, and the mods respond. Troublingly.

The whole point is that it's misogynistic. People have to deal with it. Women are facing the same issues they would face in society (to a greater degree). Men are (hopefully) going to notice it, and think about it.

If it was a game with a bunch of men keeping women as slaves, flat out, I would totally agree with you. As it is, we're trying to create some degree of thought.

[***]

Frankly, because genderswap was the first idea we had. Both mods wanted to do a genderswap game, everything else came after that.

We decided that Amazons would be a fairly good way to do a game that wouldn't make every single player be forced to do the "oh no, my role in society is changed! whatever shall I do!". Instead, the role in society hasn't changed, despite the outside, despite the fact that they're women.

[***]

Here is a fact about RP: most characters that get apped are male.

We had to have a concept that took the fact that (since we're doing a genderswapped game), most of the cast is going to be female, but not all. A female dominant society (such as the Amazons) made sense, in that context. We aren't expecting half the cast to be M, half F; we're expecting a lot of male characters playing amazons, with a fair amount of female characters as slaves.

So basically they missed the entire point of genderswap, when their core concept was genderswap, because they didn't want the mens to feel left out. But things don't stop there, as a secret related to the comm is posted on roleplaysecrets. The wank is all over the place, but here are some highlights:

The mod comes in to claim that the Amazons are the bad guys, really, so it's totally okay.

But I'm a feminist and love my women! I was only a bitch because everyone else was being bitchy. (And she's stepped down as mod. For...some reason.)

You should join it and change the entire game concept from within. That doesn't defeat the point at all.

Also villains aren't allowed to be spies.

I'm almost interested in how far they got the game off the ground, in the end...apparently it wasn't far enough to make it last.

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innocentsmith
2011-06-07 07:08 am UTC (link)

But...I'm sorry, I haven't looked at all the links because of brain meltage, so maybe this was explained.

But why would the society automatically become a strict Amazon/slave system, unless all the characters had come from society that had a rigid system like that in place? I can't think of many sources (other than Gor, which isn't exactly noted for the vivid individuality of its characters) that have that kind of social structure. Even in the historical works, there's usually someone fighting the system, isn't there? Since that's where you get plot? Or are all the characters supposed to be OCs, in which case...well, isn't that just kind of boring? o_O

What would really be entertaining would be having a bunch of characters who wouldn't want to just go along with that kind of system, mixed in with the ones who have canonical gender issues and are going "ow, my brain." Like, I don't know: Elizabeth Swann isn't having any of this "enslavement" bullshit, even if she does have a dick now, while Harry Dresden is like, "I can't be cruel to that slave! Okay, she looks like a man now but she used to be a girl and I don't hit girls even if I am one now and augh I am so confused." And meanwhile, Benton Fraser is totally unfazed and working for social justice.

...And set it all in the Amazonian temple from Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. See, that game I would play.

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innocentsmith
2011-06-07 07:27 am UTC (link)
That's kind of what I figured. Just - the vast majority of characters I'd ever want to RP would take one look at such a society and go "FIGHT THE POWER." Even the meeker, more easy-going ones, or the evil ones. Because that kind of society is stupid and kind of unworkable.

I guess it's set in some kind of quasi-Classical setting, looking at what people were saying on the anon meme? But, dude. Try telling Medea that she's a slave now because she's male. Try telling Lysistrata that. I'll just be over here eating popcorn.
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seiberwing
2011-06-07 07:37 am UTC (link)
Sci-fi with mythology mixed in. Or something. Again, they don't seem to have thought the setting out very well past the genderswap + slavery.
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seiberwing
2011-06-07 07:21 am UTC (link)
The society's already in place and cisgendered before play starts. The (genderswapped) player characters are simply inducted into it once they come in. It's not completely clear what they expect the characters to do once they get in there and get used to their new anatomy.
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seiberwing
2011-06-07 07:23 am UTC (link)
(And by 'they' I mean the creators. For something that started out as genderswap, the genderswap seems entirely superfluous to the rest of the plot.)
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sandglass
2011-06-07 07:26 am UTC (link)
Play out their kinks? (I'm not sure why they didn't just call it a kink RPG in the first place, since it's obvious and a bit less offensive than, "People need to experience misogyny!"
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rosehiptea
2011-06-07 06:40 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, it sounds like they just want an RP where women are slaves and are trying to make it sound better with a thin veneer of "It's OK because they used to be dudes!"
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beccastareyes
2011-06-07 08:39 pm UTC (link)
I remember it because I basically asked what happens when you play an alien character from a species with three sexes and it* was of the sex that didn't map to male or female. Mostly because I thought the whole point of the game was for the newcomers to band together and kick both sides'** asses.

(The answer was: 'dammit, newbie just pick one', except probably polite. But there was to be none of this non-binary biology present.)

* Canonical pronoun, not trying to be offensive.
** There was some kind of hyper-macho side the Amazons were fighting against or something.
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sandglass
2011-06-07 10:36 pm UTC (link)
Was this fandom Lilith's Brood? Because if it was, awesome!
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beccastareyes
2011-06-07 10:43 pm UTC (link)
It was, though thinking about Bel Thorne from the Vorkosigan Saga* might also be interesting.

* In Bel's case, its ancestors were created as an attempt to defeat gender norms by genetically engineering functional human hermaphrodites. It never caught on with the rest of humanity, but there's still a decent minority population of their descendents on Beta Colony. Bel didn't fit in at home so decided to go be a mercenary. Given canon technology can (and did) turn a fertile human female-assigned-at-birth into a fertile human male via growing the right organs and donation of a Y chromosome, Bel could be male or female if it wanted, and is from the easiest place in the galaxy to have that done right and without stigma.
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duraniedrama
2011-06-07 10:58 pm UTC (link)
Dropping an ooloi into that setting would have been brilliantly subversive, though.

(Or maybe Simmu from the Flat Earth series, who shifted back and forth between male and female depending on which was useful to his/her ends.)
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beccastareyes
2011-06-07 11:06 pm UTC (link)
True.

Or someone from Left Hand of Darkness, who only assumes male or female reproductive anatomy for a short time every month, and which set of organs shows up varies from month to month -- the rest of the time, they don't have either. Or a species that has one sex, or reproduces asexually. Or an intersex character.

But I get the feeling that 'pick male or female' would be the mods' responses to anything like this, despite the fact that you tell me 'sex-swap with strict gender roles' and my first thought is 'what happens when I poke it with non-gender-binary characters?'.
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full_metal_ox
2011-06-08 11:40 pm UTC (link)
Hell, as long as we're at it, how about siccing Asia the Invincible from the Swordsman wuxia movies on them? Asia would straightaway set about trying to take the place over, and silly little gender categories be damned!

(I'm still not altogether sure what pronouns to assign the character--we're talking about someone who starts out with a penis and testicles, develops an increasingly feminized appearance after being castrated as a prerequisite to mastering an esoteric kung-fu style, and thereafter presents as whatever gender seems most convenient.)
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seiberwing
2011-06-08 11:54 pm UTC (link)
And what about the straight-up inhuman characters? Throw a couple of Transformers into this place and it's not going to matter what anatomy you give them, they'll be more fixated on being suddenly fleshy than they are on whether they have breasts or not.
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