One True Pairing: Love, Sexuality and Identity in TROUF

One True Pairing: Love, Sexuality and Identity in TROUF

In my first personal essay on TROUF, I briefly discussed the significance of Blue and Alaster's relationship and the impact it had on me as a teenager. I often look back on this part of TROUF as perhaps the most interesting aspect of it to me. There are many reasons for this, but primarily, this relationship within the roleplay was my way of exploring the possibility of being in a relationship as a teenager in a safe environment.

At fourteen, I barely understood my own sexuality. It had only recently occurred to me that it might be women I was romantically attracted to instead of men. In my rural Appalachian community, the idea of someone else finding out about this terrified me. I feared rejection, particularly from my friends and my parents. My friends, after all, were mostly female. Maybe they wouldn't want to be friends with me if they knew I was a lesbian. Maybe they would feel threatened by me, the way I felt threatened by men, who leered at me and made inappropriate comments.

I was a somewhat androgynous child, mostly by my own design. I had a need to prove myself as capable and masculine as my younger brothers. My brothers shared a talent for music with my father, a professional musician and music teacher, that I could never quite access, though my father always insisted I was musical and could do it if I “put my mind to it.” I was, however, scrappy and driven. Time after time as a teenager, I found myself faced with some obstacle, whether it was my disconnect with music or my sexuality or the strange melancholy that would take me sometimes, crippling in its intensity. Every time, my reaction was to beat my fists against the obstacle with unrelenting fury, sometimes making progress against them from sheer persistence. Dad said I could do it if I put my mind to it. I put my mind to breaking out of the box I found society trying to push me into.

In the midst of this, there was TROUF. And there was Blue. She was like a friend to me, or perhaps more accurately, a sister. I had younger brothers but I did not have a sister and I had always wanted one. Perhaps I thought a sister would understand me better than my brothers, who'd never been whistled at by a passing stranger or told not to cut their hair short because it was too masculine. Blue understood me, though she wasn't me, or at least she was not entirely me.

She shared traits with me. She was angry most of the time, angry that the world she lived in wanted to define her by her biology. For Blue, this meant her race. For me, it meant my gender. They were two sides of the same coin. I was drawn to women, not least of all because it was part of what made me masculine, which I so desperately wanted to embrace. Blue, being a nelfkin, a race who were treated poorly by most other people in the realm, was drawn to a fairy, the race that hated nelfkins the most.

The relationship between Blue and Alaster developed almost as organically as a real relationship might, though perhaps more fancifully. It was, as you might expect, an awkward courtship, considering that myself and my friend, Shey, who played Alaster, were very young and understood next to nothing about being in love. Nonetheless, Blue and Alaster fell in love. I like to think they recognized a mutual hurt in one another. Blue stopped throwing herself against her obstacles with such fury. She had Alaster now to soften the blow.

I did not, of course, think of them at the time as an allegory for forbidden love, though that is exactly what they were. It would not be until later on that I would begin to look for representation of myself in the media, surprised when I did not find it there. I could not relate to television shows like Will & Grace. I wanted to see a queer relationship that developed as naturally as the relationship between Blue and Alaster had developed.

I began to question why I never saw myself reflected in media when I was fifteen. By then, I'd started to explore the idea of bisexuality. The older I grew, the more often I found myself attracted to people at all, be they men or women. Mostly, when I look back on it, I am shocked by how few people of either gender I was attracted to. It was only recently for me that I began to understand that I am not a very sexual person, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.

My parents have since become very supportive of my sexual identity, but it was a learning curve for all of us. I don't think either of them expected to raise a daughter like me. I wasn't just gay, or bisexual, I was rebelling against the idea of being thought of as “feminine.” Women did not have to be feminine, in my mind, and men did not necessarily have to be masculine. For instance, Blue and Alaster did not fit the idea of a “normal” relationship that I had in my head. Alaster was the more vulnerable of the two, while Blue was always steadfast and strong. She protected him at every opportunity. She could fight and defend herself, he could not. She was plain, he was beautiful. She had gray eyes as interesting as metal washers, he had vibrant baby blues.

The very first person to make an effort to reach out to me about my sexuality was Shey. Before my parents, or my brothers or any of my other friends said anything about it to me, she was the one who wrote me a note that told me she hoped she ended up with a handsome musician and that I met a hippie girl who didn't shave her legs so we could both be happy in life. I must confess, I didn't quite know how to take it. It wasn't that I was surprised, rather, I was surprised by how normal it seemed. Of course she knew before anyone else. However, in my world, such things were not spoken of. She had broken taboo by mentioning it. And it opened the floodgates for me.

I realized then that I was tired of hiding. I had hidden in Blue, who was stronger than I was. I had created Leffi, the elf, who I always thought of as gay, though her orientation was never expressly stated, and that was just more hiding. When I created her, I'd thought it might be easier to reveal her sexuality to my friends than it would be to reveal my own, but I still could not make myself do it. All around me, people treated homosexuality like it was somehow shameful. And I was ashamed for a very long time, but if my dearest friend, the one who created Alaster, who knew my heart like no one else, saw nothing wrong with it, why was I still disguising my true self?

This is not to say that I was then set free from the shackles of societal norms. I struggled for many more years with understanding myself, eventually calling myself a bisexual who was not very sexual, and my parents worried that I had isolated myself from having a relationship of any sort. I was afraid of that too, for a long time. That I did not often desire another person in that way seemed as shameful as desiring women.

However, it was not true that I had never been in a relationship. I knew how to have a relationship in an RPG like TROUF. Ultimately, this led me to literate roleplay with other people online, where I explored my sexuality much as I had learned to do as a child with TROUF. Unlike with TROUF, I could experiment with people I didn't know in person and have strong connections to. I did find, over time, that I developed deep friendships with several of these people. I was able, for instance, to admit that I was a virgin in my early twenties to a friend I roleplayed (and still roleplay) with via email.

These roleplays via email started, for me, with Blue and Alaster. Shey and I spent, I think, more time in TROUF that just about anyone else. Sometimes, this resulted in us roleplaying together and accidentally leaving our friends behind in the main story, though we tried to avoid it. After a while, we struck upon an idea.

One summer, we spent nearly a week together at the West Virginia State Fair in a camper with my parents and little brothers. I raised goats and sheep as 4-H projects every year and so I had to be at the fair that long, but there was a lot of free time between showing animals that had always bored me to tears. Usually, I'd spent most of my time at the fair by myself. The previous year, I'd spent all my free time on the computers available to the public in the exhibit hall. That year, with Shey by my side, I still spent a lot of time at the computers. This was when we started the “Fatherhood” roleplay via email.

Fatherhood was inspired by the “Modern TROUF” roleplay that our group had started on our forum in tandem with our main story. In Modern, everything was the same except it was set in modern day. In Fatherhood, things were slightly different. It focused on Alaster and Blue in their married years in modern day, and their child, Arabelle. We'd decided to explore this idea of our characters as parents because when we weren't at the computers or hanging out with my goats, we were watching a VHS tape of Bill Cosby On Fatherhood on the small TV in our camper.

I recently mentioned this to Shey, and how when I first found out that Bill Cosby had been accused of sexually assaulting a large number of women my reaction was sorrow that my precious childhood memory was now connected to that. Her reaction was much like my own, she said, adding that “Alaster had looked up to him.”

Regardless, Bill Cosby's influence on Fatherhood was an element of comedy. Alaster and Blue were amusing in their attempts at parenting their strong-willed daughter. I can't remember now how long we continued this roleplay, only that we did eventually stop. I went to college. Shey and I fell out of touch for a bit, mostly, I've always thought, because of my depression and anxiety that began to make it difficult for me to maintain personal relationships.

Still, neither of us could quite give up on Blue and Alaster. Periodically, we would contact one another with a short story one of us had written, or a song that made us think of them. I rewrote the first meeting between Blue and Alaster in our modern day alternate universe several times over. Each time, Blue was a waitress in a coffee shop and Alaster was her friend's deadbeat brother, and somehow the pull between them was irresistible. To me, they became the very definition of true love, supporting one another through thick and thin. Of course, they also represented my friendship with Shey, which was one I could never justify barricading myself from. We were friends, and would always be friends, and I do believe that is still true, despite my unique ability to make myself completely unavailable to the rest of the world.

During my third year of college, we started talking about writing modern TROUF short stories again. At the time, I was dealing with a newly discovered problem – panic attacks. TROUF was a blessed relief from my anxiety, the same escape it had always been. We were older now and both of us more conscious of the ways in which TROUF lacked a bit of diversity. All of the characters, traditionally, were white-skinned and heterosexual. Why didn't we have any gay characters? When we thought about this, we quickly came to the conclusion that if any of the characters were gay, it was probably Fae and Shadow.

By this time, we were very attached to all of the characters from the main story. Fae and Shadow were a natural fit for one another, as they had been friends in the main story. Though we never got around to writing the whole story at the time, the idea was cemented in my mind. Fae and Shadow were together, as surely as Blue and Alaster. If you've been reading along on TROUF and have noticed how close these two characters seem, particularly in stories written by myself, this was intentional. Like Blue and Alaster, Fae and Shadow are meant to share their happy ever after when the story concludes.

On the other hand, there is “proto” TROUF, the story of the heroes who first used the magical crystals given to them by the gods. The decision was made by the group when we first came up with this concept that the proto characters would not have their happy ever after. And while the details of this are not yet decided upon, the story already has a darker feel to it. This is the story that Leffi belongs to.

Leffi, in many ways, represents my own struggle with my sexual identity, and also my gender identity. She is not like me in that she is tall and extroverted and prone to smiling. She is like me in that her romantic feelings are quite complex but rarely spoken out loud. Despite being private about her own feelings, Leffi goes to great length to support her friends, perhaps because she knows what it is like to hide what you are. In particular, she is close to Emma's character, Wyndal, and Shey's character, Trynace.

This is partly in keeping with the main story. Leffi has the Codex crystal, which is the crystal that Blue carries. The crystals have unique relationships to one another. For instance, Codex's powers compliment Cerebrum, the crystal that Alaster and Trynace both carry during their respective quests. Codex also shares a bond with the Null crystal, used by Zi and Wyndal. Blue and Zi are good friends, as are Leffi and Wyndal.

Most accurately, I would describe Leffi as bisexual, but much like myself, she is drawn to intelligence and personality more so than physical appearance. In Wyndal, she finds an intelligence that rivals her own. However, Wyndal is gay, the only gay male in TROUF as of now, so their relationship is only one of friendship. Leffi spends a lot of time trying to hook Wyndal up with men they meet during their quest, much to Wyndal's embarrassment. She does this because she fears that she cannot find “true love” for herself.

As mentioned in the short story “In the Library of Skye,” Leffi has terrible luck because she was cursed by the goddess Jilna. She is as unlucky in love as she is in everything else, though she is always optimistic about her bad luck. Of course, as luck would have it, the person Leffi is most drawn to is her compliment, Trynace. And Trynace is head over heels in love with a strapping young knight of the realm named Spencer Spencer.

True to her character, Leffi makes the most of this. Trynace becomes her closest friend and she allows herself to be happy for Trey when she realizes how deep the bond between Trey and Spencer truly is. Of course, this is proto TROUF and no one lives happily ever after. Leffi's bad luck extends to her optimistic world view. Things do not get better, as she expects. They get worse.

Even now, TROUF helps me sort out my own emotional baggage about my identity. Writing Leffi and Blue allows me to explore the idea of strong, masculine women as heroes, rather than female heroes that can be seen as sex symbols. Leffi reflects my own identity as a bisexual in a more direct manner, but Blue and Alaster still break down societal barriers with their heterosexual relationship.

I hope I can continue to explore all of these themes in TROUF, and also other examples of diversity that I did not know much about as a young, white Appalachian. It would be wrong to call TROUF truly intersectional and all inclusive at this point in time, but I hope that it will continue to grow and perhaps one day, someone else will read these stories and see themselves reflected back.

- Rachel