unforum

[Cougar Draven]

[12th]

[Cougar Draven]

[Josh Rallus]

[Scottums]

Visibility is important. Seeing yourself in your favorite movie/tv show/slender*log can have huge meaning to people.

However, there is always the risk of making A STATEMENT with your material instead of making a good story. It's a delicate balance between making a minority character visible but not so much that you can't see anything else. And of course, the story is all important. If the story does not call for sexual orientation to be addressed in some way, forcing it in would be awkward.

Like ChildOfAtom suggested, it would be an interesting to see if a gay character (or other cultural sub-gruops) would react differently to Ol' Slendy than the standard while male high school/college student. That would be an interesting challenge.

Also, a gay Proxy would look so fabulous.

[ChildOfAtom]

[Scottums]

[Taluria]

Actually, at least in blogs, there are plenty of female creators and characters. I'm actually half of the creative background of a blog that has characters dealing with bisexuality, pansexuality, gender-identity, and so on. And working on another blog (which is on hiatus at the moment), featuring a lesbian couple. I also know of at least one blog with a male homosexual couple, which is sadly over at this point. I think it's just easier to get into that sort of thing with a blog.

[Cougar Draven]

[KrisTrauma]

Unless is plot relevant (this character has a boyfriend/girlfriend) it really doesn't matter what his or her sexual orientation is...

[cochinosanchez]

I'm Bi and a minority. Do I win?

[robgmartin]

My $.02 worth

[KrisTrauma]

My slenderman actor is gay...does that count?

[ALEXGORDON]

I got the idea that Greg from Dark Harvest was gay or bisexual, however there's no confirmation to support that. He also wasn't ever a main character. Oh well.

[qaqa]

Greg always pinged for me back when he was alive in DH, but I've been wrong many times. Months after the fact I'm pretty sure he's straight.

I think sexuality in a series can go interesting places if you allow the people to be fallible and human. Sex is a part of who we are, and intimacy between the right or wrong people in a horror story can go all sorts of places. I had worked on a New York-based concept for a long time, now defunct (I'm toying with something far more impossible at the moment), featuring twentysomethings which I couldn't do due to budget constraints and lack of performers, and at least two of the characters were not straight - one was a bi female, the other was gay. This was relatively incidental to the horror, except for the fact that a great deal of the subplots and background hinged on some of their professional, familial and romantic entanglements. The gay character was having an affair with a married man who ended up figuring heavily into the larger horror plot, and the girl's flirtation with another protagonist who was in a committed relationship added a layer of resonance to what ultimately happened to some of those people.

This was integral for two reasons - on one level, it was just something I felt needed to be explored in order to make protagonists more human, and it's understandably something you're not going to see depicted with adolescent or most younger college-aged protagonists. But young people, or people in general, have sex and make stupid mistakes because they're into the wrong people. They hurt each other or people they care about because they want something in the moment, whether it's to get laid or whatever else. We all do that, and I thought showing the interconnected messes these people make like anyone else would help us to understand them and relate.

On another level, it was plot. Some of these characters become involved with people who ultimately have a huge impact on the story. And the larger vlog concept itself was actually based in the unthinkable, which was using Slenderman as an otherdimensional force with a sexual violation component. It literally came to rape our women and breed, and its bargain with a specific family many years ago was key to the story. That was something I thought would shock and appall people, and had never been done before.

tl;dr sex and relationships are important to depict, but that's only depending on your story or how you choose to present it. In many vlogs it's really not an issue, and that's fine. Although it must be said EMH has, I feel, admirably begun to depict a similar sort of Rosemary's Baby/gyno-horror angle with the whole Evan/HABIT/monster children thing, both with Steph and with the other stuff with Nick, etc. in the ancillary text.

(also, I had no idea Josh was bi.)