Writing Queer Characters, Pt. 3
The past couple days, I went over accidentally writing queer characters and then the beginnings of intentional queer characters. Now, this is where they started to become more prominent.
Throughout high school, I got more comfortable with the LGBTQ+ community and at the time identified as an ally. As I started noticing it more, it became part of my characters more. The characters of Tyler and Adrian, Carmen and Reyna, and soon Kelsey and Daniella all ended up becoming crushes if not a couple. I noticed Ash was bisexual and Lexi was asexual. Then came Noelle and Lucy.
I figured out I was asexual when I was 18. In turn, once I'd accepted my identity a bit more, I ended up noticing queerness in my characters a bit more. I turned more crushes into couples where I saw fit, and even moved a few couples around in terms of who I wanted to pair with. I did realize Lexi being asexual was me accidentally projecting again, which was a tad annoying because I thought I was distancing myself from her (don't worry, I now have but she is still asexual). I ended up making a few other characters queer because of the Vibes I'd accidentally given them. Most authors would probably let you know that characters tend to develop on their own, and I've seen queer/allied authors on Twitter and Tumblr say they discovered their characters were queer as they got to know them better, and that's how it happened for The Secret Portal.
When I've talked about School of the Legends on my blog, I've mentioned that it's still in the early stages of development. I decided to play around with the avatar maker I used for TSP characters and made some of them, and as I did, I ended up making the vast majority of them queer. I haven't introduced the SOTL characters on here yet because I don't think they're developed at the same level as TSP yet, but I will some day.
The thing is, I know there will be people who complain that most of my characters are queer. "It's not realistic." First of all, most of my friends are queer and we became friends without knowing this. Queer people flock together. Second, both TSP and SOTL are fantasy which means anything is possible. Third, there is still and disproportionate representation of queer characters, so I'm making up for lost time. Fourth--I don't care let me have fun.
I'm putting these posts on this topic under "writing advice" for this reason: writing queer characters opens the doors for many more interesting stories. I of course do not have all of the experiences, so actually telling you how to write queer characters oversteps my authority. If you're not queer, just talk to queer people. Insisting that cishet people can't write queer characters is insisting that every writer has to be out--and that's not okay. But this blog isn't really about that, and queer people are so diverse that there's no one-size-fits-all way to portray us. I just wanted to share my progress.
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Characters I mentioned:
Anathi (aka Adrian): https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/character-introduction-adrian-zeon
Atsila (aka Reyna): https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/character-introduction-atsila-mclain
Xitlali (aka Daniella): https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/character-introduction-daniella-santiago
Ash: https://kaylinrosealexande.wixsite.com/kaylinalexanderbooks/post/character-introduction-ash-hathaway
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