Boys Will Be Girls, Girls Will Be Cloud Strife

I lucked out when my roommate decided that we should move to an all-female dorm on campus. I mean, my first thoughts were "Great, here comes even more estrogen and rhinestones and jewelry sales pitches as dorm programs."

Fortunately, my roommate ended up choosing the Gamer Girl floor at our school. You know, the one the RA decorates like a Super Mario world, where no one talks face to face and everyone has an anime wall scroll in their room. No time for painting each others' nails- the new Final Fantasy game just came out!

Not just that, but many of the girls on my floor roleplay as well- whether in the classic desktop games such as Dungeons and Dragons, or online via IM or a game such as Gaia. The thing is, they all roleplay as male characters- often in romantic relationships with female characters who are also played by women.

Cloud from Final Fantasy is one of the favorite characters roleplayed by the girls.

This threw me for a loop. I mean, the girls I'm talking about are exclusively heterosexual. If they were roleplaying male characters in M/M relationships, I could understand it a bit better, since they're all also slash and yaoi fans.

However, these girls are playing male characters with female characters, so I'm not entirely sure what to think of it. The only explanation I can find is the same one often used to justify slash. The female characters are often not as developed and thus not as interesting as the male characters in a franchise, particularly in video games, so maybe it's just because the guys are more interesting? Or maybe, because women spend so much of their lives being passive, especially in romantic relationships, that they use video game and anime roleplaying as an outlet to be active romantically. In that case, it's not that the gender that matters so much, I think, as who is playing a more active role.

Whatever the reason, I thought it was still a great example: even people you would never label as being queer (in a sexual sense, anyways) are playing with gender to suit themselves.