Transcript
WEBVTT
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This is deep.
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This is getting really deep right off the bat.
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Ready?
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In high school, a picture of myself wearing women's clothes went public.
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I could see in Drow society that transitioning to a woman could be seen as social climbing.
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This mechanically doesn't make sense.
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That's why I want to do it.
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Heck yeah.
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Cleric at 10th level, they learn divine intervention.
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That's like the new ability they get.
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What changed?
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I want to dress like Laura Dern.
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Hello friends.
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Welcome to Characters Without Stories.
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A TTRPG podcast about the roads not yet traveled.
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I'm Star.
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This episode I'm joined by Justin Gagliani.
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Justin is a co host of the So You Want to Be a Dungeon Master podcast, a TTRPG content creator, and a published writer.
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Justin, welcome to the show.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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Excited to be here.
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How long have you been podcasting?
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Goodness.
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I've been podcasting probably for oh boy.
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Three, four years, but there was a stint of time where I did a different podcast with my sister where we just talked about all kinds of stuff and that went on for like almost two years.
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Didn't get any traction, did not do well because there was no niche.
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It was like one episodes about mythical monsters and the next episodes about our favorite Pokemon.
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And it just did not do well because people didn't know what to search for.
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Whatever.
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Then one of my friends, very close friend, Taylor from a home game that we play in was like, Hey, do you want to do a D and D podcast?
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And I was like, I would love to do a D&D podcast and thus So You Want to Be a DM was created.
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God, that's been going on since maybe October of 2023.
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We started recording episodes and we didn't publish anything until late December, January 2024 to kind of build a little bit of a catalog.
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When I started, I didn't know anything.
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And so I didn't do that.
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And everybody's like, you got to start with three episodes in the can.
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And so you can release three at once and people can binge.
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And I'm like, I didn't do that.
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I was just like, let's throw it out there and see what happens.
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Yeah.
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No, most of the things we're doing, we're kind of learning as we go, as we add more and more to the repertoire of, so you want to be a DM.
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Yeah, definitely.
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You got to start somewhere.
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How long had you been playing D&D before you started podcasting?
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I would say probably north of 5 years, give or take, most of that time being a DM, kind of getting stuck in that role of the forever DM, but finding out as I've like, been a player a couple times, finding out that I actually do prefer being the Dungeon Master, some of that has to do with like, relinquishing control, it's a whole side story that I need to figure out on my own, maybe with a therapist, I don't know.
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What do you like about being a DM?
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Oh goodness, I think I just love the idea of sharing stories with the table and seeing how they touch on it and how they react to certain things and like I love making people laugh, and I think that's a big part of my personal DMing style and how I play tabletop games is always funny.
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I'm interested in one day pursuing like, a more dramatic and like, hardcore like, "your parents fell at the hands of the demon lord." Like, that's super interesting and I want to try it one day.
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But most of the time, it's just jokes.
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It's just silly laughs that I like that have people laughing.
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Have fun.
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And I think that's kind of where it comes from is just being the ringleader of a bunch of silly goofs is kind of why I love it so much.
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Like many of my guests being a forever DM, you're bringing a character you haven't had a chance to play.
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Yes.
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So.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Justin, who are you bringing to the table?
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So, I made a character that was supposed to be for a short campaign that one of my players wanted to run, and for a slew of reasons, that never happened.
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And so I have this character kinda locked and loaded, ready to go at a moment's notice.
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Her name is Jessica Jeroux, because I love alliterations.
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I could talk so much just about the name.
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I love alliterations so much.
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So Jessica Jeroux, JJ.
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The Jeroux has like a silent X at the end, because I'm obsessed with like needlessly pompous names.
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Like kind of like this pretentiousness that's just unnecessary.
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So having like silent letters.
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My actual last name has a silent letter in it, so that works out.
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Jessica Jeroux is a drow wizard of the Chronurgy magic arcane tradition, so essentially time magic.
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I love wizards, I love having as many spells as possible, and then also like, I wanted to really explore an interesting dynamic with this character in relation to my own experience with gender.
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So, like, I, as a dungeon master and as a human being, have used a lot of what I refer to as, like, classic D&D lore, so, like, Forgotten Realms, Faerun, all that stuff.
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But I've, from the very get go, have changed a ton of it because there's, it's steeped in so much problematic behavior, whether it's, like, how it views fantasy races or, like, the idea that certain things can be born inherently evil and yadda yadda yadda.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So I wanted to explore a very specific part of it that I kind of picked up from reading the very first, and I probably personally, no offense to anybody who likes the series, it just wasn't for me, but R.
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A.
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Salvatore's, like Drizzt Do'Urden or whatever his name is.
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Another pretentious name.
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Yeah.
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Another pretentious name, yes.
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Multiple Z's and an apostrophe, you know it's D&D.
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You need some apostrophes.
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Mm hmm.
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Reading about.
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the drow society that he grew up in and how it was incredibly matriarchal but also super separated by gender at least in that first book i've been told that things change and that there are exceptions to the rule and that's fantastic but just using that as like this core concept and asking the question of like what it would be like to be trans in that society to have been, you know, assigned male at birth and then, you know, have that inner feeling, that gender dysphoria of feeling like you are truly a woman and what that would mean in that society and stuff like that.
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And also giving myself an interesting challenge in terms of like, what if my family is not cool with it?
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Yeah.
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The reason I feel just to get ahead of some things that I would ask people if I heard people saying these things, I personally identify as non binary, I use they them pronouns, I've explored my own gender a ton in my life, both in the closet and out of the closet, and I've used in the past, specifically Dungeons and Dragons, but tabletop games in general, to explore so many aspects of my own identity, whether it was being queer, like I played a bisexual character.
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Before I ever felt comfortable enough coming out as bisexual.
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I played a non binary or femme presenting characters far before I ever felt comfortable identifying publicly as non binary or using they them pronouns.
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I even played characters who were sober and didn't drink alcohol before I finally made the plunge to be like, I'm not gonna drink alcohol anymore.
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And it's been over a year.
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I wanted to explore that more fully in a safe place that felt fun and interesting.
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I also get cool magic spells and stuff.
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Yeah, that's kind of the impetus of the creation of Jessica Jeroux.
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And this is a trans woman, correct?
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Yeah.
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Why a trans woman?
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I wanted to explore both the character and my own relationship with what it means to be a woman.
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For people listening, I'm using air quotes when I say that, but I think that's kind of what it was, what it was all about.
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A sort of nudging of myself as the player and creator of the character to feel more comfortable exploring femininity and different aspects of it and stuff like that.
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I went through such an interesting journey when it comes to my own gender presentation and identity and stuff like that in high school.
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This is deep.
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This is getting really deep right off the bat.
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Ready?
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In high school, a picture of myself wearing women's clothes went public.
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Yeah, bad, not good for 17, 18 year old Justin, who's so in the closet at this point about every aspect of that, right?
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And it rocked my world, and it was like, just having so many of my friends immediately turn their backs on me, having a select few stand by my side, and all of these different things, and just being like, as soon as I go away to college, I'll never do this again, this is a phase, this is a weird temptation, and I'll get over it, and it'll be fine, blah blah blah, not the case, right?
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Because, you There are certain parts of your identity and yourself that you can't just turn away forever.
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And so slowly getting more accepting of myself, let alone other people's acceptance of me, that wasn't even a concern.
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Like, I am very fortunate and blessed to have parents and family who are incredibly accepting.
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Them, like, kicking me out in those kind of worst case scenarios was never a thought.
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It was always more about.
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Me accepting myself and feeling comfortable enough to do things and like pushing aside my own like inner demons to like experiment in things in a public way.
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The first time I did nail polish, it was the darkest colors possible.
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Like it can never be a shade of pink.
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It can never be a bright color.
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It had to be like black at first.
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That way, God forbid, I'm in a gas station and some guy is like, why are you painting your nails?
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I could be like, it's metal, dude.
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Like, I don't know that I would have some sort of excuse.
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As if I need one and then like anything, any, any form of gender expression has always been a huge challenge for me to find the courage to do that.
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And I'm was hoping that this character would kind of nudge me along to accept the more inner desires to present more feminine in different aspects.
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I think that's kind of where it came from.
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Yeah, at the point that you built this character or design this character, where were you in your gender journey?
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Jesus this was probably like a year ago.
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So like a lot further than in the past or something like that, like this character, isn't that old of a creation, but still to this day, I mean, there are times where depending on where I'm going, I just recently, maybe like two weeks ago, three weeks ago, came back from a high school, like a friend that I grew up with in elementary school through high school, we were super close, always considered each other best friends and stuff like that.
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He comes from a very religious Christian household and when I went to his wedding, I didn't paint my nails because I thought it would make me feel more comfortable and it's such a sad thing that I was willing to eat that part of myself to make other people feel more comfortable because that's in reality what it is, is making other people feel more comfortable and I ended up Just feeling like I was lacking a part of myself in this very simple way of expressing my own gender.
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Because, I mean, painting your nails doesn't have to be anything.
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It doesn't mean that you're non binary or anything like that, right?
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Like, how you personally perceive gender expression is up to the individual, but like, for me doing that was like a big eye opener of being like, whoa, maybe this friendship isn't all it's cracked up to be if I feel like I have to do this.
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Yeah.
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So, I think, yeah, it was just, Even to this day, I'm still always in this constant battle with myself and my own, like, sort of anxiety.
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Always thinking about worst case scenarios, which is how my anxiety manifests.
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The example of a guy at a gas station wanting to, like, fight me because I have a rainbow pride flag or some shit It's been a lot of that and like slowly feeling more and more comfortable being myself.
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And it's been honestly, the, I've been so lucky in this little niche of the TTRPG community that we're in, like a lot of us little creators and stuff like that, like all from the, so many people that I met through that January pledge drive for Palestine, I've just met so many beautiful individuals who already passed that super low bar of being against genocide.
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And then from there being like, wow, there's so many other people.
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And I get to introduce myself as Justin non binary they, them.
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And it's so much easier when they, that's like the first interaction, as opposed to being like, I know you've known me for 30 years as this, but now I'm this, or I've always been this, but now I'm publicly this or whatever.
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But like, that was the call for Jessica Jeroux pushing myself in a very safe and not very dangerous way of just being like, let's explore this.
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I've played female characters in the past and femme presenting characters and stuff like that, but never specifically a trans one.
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And so I wanted to explore that space a little bit as a non binary person and somebody who wants to deeply on the inside present slightly more femininely, but has never had the courage to do so.
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The idea of me wearing a skirt in public, there's a part of me that's like, Oh, that sounds incredible.
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And then there's another part of me that's like, that is so scary.
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I cannot even imagine.
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Hopefully Jessica Jeroux will push me over the hump a little bit and we can figure some things out.
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So I think it is a fascinating choice to play a trans woman in Drow society.
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I just want to give a brief shout out to a podcast called The Slovenly Trulls.
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They did a mini series essentially on the problematic nature of drow society.
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It's a great listen.
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You should all go and don't drop everything right now, but go later and listen to that podcast.
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Give me a very quick breakdown or primer on why there's such a gender divide in Drow society.
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So my understanding of it is that some of it stems down, as is true with a lot of Forgotten Realms stuff, like the reason that for some reason in that lore, orcs are inherently evil.
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Like if you're born an orc, you're evil.
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And that's just kind of the way it is, unless you're that one in a million Drizzt Do'Urden who stands alone.
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It has a lot to do with the gods, and like, the pantheons that the Forgotten Realms uses.
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I believe that a lot of the Drow society customs come from Llolth.
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This like, spider queen, this evil, somewhat chaotic.
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Chaotic in like the more, not in like a D&D alignment way, but chaotic in like real world ways.
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That's my understanding of it, at least.
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As soon as I kind of like got the bag of, okay, this is kind of what it was like, I don't do a ton of research past that, because I'm always like, same thing with like orcs being evil, or drow, specifically the dark skinned elves being evil, and all these different things, and like slavery is huge in Forgotten Realms, and always just being like, no, I'm not going to use that actually.
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I'm going to change that, because I don't like it.
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That's my understanding of it.
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It's very superficial.
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I just know that in the society, women are normally in positions of power, they're normally like the high priestesses, they have a lot of magic and stuff like that, and a lot of the men happen to be more like soldiers, it's almost like bees in a way, except bees usually have like the one queen, but it's kind of like that, where, you know, there's like the drones, the soldiers, they go out and they do the fighting and stuff like that, they can be on the front lines, whereas the women are the ones who are kind of controlling society, And in these positions of power within each household, and also these, like, priestesses of Llolth, and I think maybe some of it has to do with the fact that Llolth is always identified or presented as a female deity.
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Maybe that has something to do with it, but past that, if there's a deeper thing, I would go to Slovenly Trulls because it's not coming from me.
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Yeah, well, and this is all coming from writers.
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It's not like there's some sort of inherent way that drow are that.
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Cannot be changed.
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Obviously things are changing and yeah, you know, and there were terrible sexist reasons that they did it Yeah, this was you know, a choice that people made and it's interesting that whenever they build a matriarchy, it's evil.
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It's automatically evil.
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There's not a society ruled by women That's not like problematic.
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That's so true.
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I mean, maybe the Rashemon.
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I don't know that much about them But yeah, so I think it's interesting, both of us knowing that it's a problematic trope, not something we should really play into, but you're building a character that very specifically relates to that trope, meaning that in the game, you would need to have this society built in this very stratified way in order for the character to be related to that.
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I mean, I think that's one of the most interesting parts about the character.
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As far as I know them so far.
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Yeah, true.
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How do you feel about, like, coming to the table where that's something that exists in the world?
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That's a great question.
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I think that the way we were planning, because I had had discussions with the game master of that particular campaign that never was, I think the way that we were going to handle it is very like, this society exists, you know, And it's over there and I have left that society.
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And so there wasn't going to be a ton of mentions to it, or there wasn't going to be a lot of my character having a side quest where I go back home and we check it out and say, Hey mom and dad, I'm home now.
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I'm Jessica or something like that.
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Yeah.
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I think it was a little loose and fast with how we were kind of playing with it in a very like, you know, kind of in like a superficial way.
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Like it's part of my backstory.
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This is how I grew up and then I entered the let's call it like the modern world where other societies have been way more welcoming and it was also I think the game master was using ooh boy Call of the Netherdeep like one of the Critical Role settings and there are parts of that setting because Matt Mercer is much more accepting than the old school writers of Forgotten Realms where there are trans and non binary characters and stuff like that.
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So it was just like, here's a mention of the old world where gender was huge and like societal norms and all this stuff and that's in the past and this is the future.
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So I think that's kind of how we were handling it.
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I could see in Drow society that transitioning to a woman could be seen as social climbing.
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Yeah, certainly.
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Do you think that that was the reaction that Drow society had to Jessica?
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Did Jessica transition while she was in Menzoberranzan or in Drow society, or was it just a thing that she wanted to do?
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I think the way that I wrote it in the backstory was that she had begun experimenting.
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Like, the small ways that you can experiment with gender expression and gender identity.
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That aren't big deal things like taking hormones or surgery or something like, kind of very small things like, for example, the way you dress or something like that, like certain mannerisms that you can try on or even like name changes or pronouns or like small little things.
00:19:45.289 --> 00:19:57.259
And then because she's a wizard, I was going to introduce some like very basic low level spells, maybe even like disguise self as like a way to sort of experiment with expression.
00:19:57.634 --> 00:20:23.730
And then being like caught having that nightmare experience of oh my gosh I'm not ready for the world to see what I feel like on the inside and now they have and it was abrupt and it was because that it mirrors my experience that I talked about earlier I came out as bisexual first and then non binary like as I fully came to understand sexuality and gender at least for me I didn't come out as bisexual until I was 30 and then non binary at like 32.
00:20:23.779 --> 00:21:01.969
I'm 33 now, so like, not that, not that long ago, you know, like, uh, pretty late in the game for some people, that nightmare experience in high school potentially pushed me off of fully accepting myself for years, for like over a decade, if not more, so I think that was part of it, and then just having her kind of experiment a little bit at home, get caught and then just come to a head of being like these people are not going to understand me like they're too blinded by their own sort of cognitive dissonance of like this is how gender is supposed to work and I can see that they're wrong and that I don't fit within these binaries.
00:21:02.214 --> 00:21:06.954
And so I'm going to leave keeping in mind that like elves age differently in D&D and stuff like that.
00:21:06.954 --> 00:21:10.954
And I kind of like put it on to human year perspective just for this ease.
00:21:11.244 --> 00:21:15.193
She leaves around like 15, 16 and she's on her own.
00:21:15.194 --> 00:21:15.644
Very young.
00:21:15.663 --> 00:21:16.683
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
00:21:16.684 --> 00:21:16.914
Yeah.
00:21:16.914 --> 00:21:16.933
Yeah.
00:21:16.934 --> 00:21:20.564
Navigating through the underdark at 15 or 16.
00:21:20.644 --> 00:21:21.224
Pretty much.
00:21:21.224 --> 00:21:28.984
I mean, yeah, she goes through the underdark, but then pretty quickly goes above ground because like that was always a big thing that I found in Drow society with R.
00:21:28.984 --> 00:21:29.085
A.
00:21:29.105 --> 00:21:39.444
Salvatore specifically, like the Drizzt books is like, there's such a big othering of the upper world versus the underdark, like a lot of like, you, those top siders, you can't trust them.
00:21:40.075 --> 00:21:43.324
So like, of course being like, well, I can't even trust my own family.
00:21:43.375 --> 00:21:44.028
So yeah.
00:21:44.299 --> 00:21:45.459
Let's see what's up there.
00:21:45.509 --> 00:21:51.009
And so having her kind of explore that pretty quickly and like having there be this huge disconnect.
00:21:51.199 --> 00:21:52.219
I'm just thinking of this now.
00:21:52.219 --> 00:22:00.429
It's interesting that she's a time wizard specifically because there's such an interesting disconnect between the past and the future for Jessica.
00:22:00.578 --> 00:22:03.719
I, as the creator of Jessica didn't give her a dead name.
00:22:04.065 --> 00:22:09.505
There is no male associated name of when that Jessica was given at birth.
00:22:09.515 --> 00:22:11.375
I didn't even come up with one intentionally.
00:22:11.384 --> 00:22:12.115
There is none.
00:22:12.144 --> 00:22:13.193
It will never come up.
00:22:13.194 --> 00:22:16.644
I didn't want to explore having the character deadname her.
00:22:16.663 --> 00:22:17.355
Like, no.
00:22:17.423 --> 00:22:18.173
We're not doing that.
00:22:18.253 --> 00:22:18.584
Yeah.
00:22:18.584 --> 00:22:19.605
There is no deadname.
00:22:19.605 --> 00:22:20.964
It's just Jessica Jeroux.
00:22:20.983 --> 00:22:23.244
And that name specifically, the name Jessica.
00:22:23.509 --> 00:22:26.460
Now it's the name of my cat, which is hilarious, but like,
00:22:27.628 --> 00:22:29.250
Is your cat like dark gray?
00:22:30.109 --> 00:22:32.398
She is gray and white actually.
00:22:34.609 --> 00:22:42.409
So my name is Justin, but my entire family from the time I was pretty much born, call me Jessy with a Y at the end specifically.
00:22:42.789 --> 00:22:45.079
So my whole family calls me Jessy.
00:22:45.128 --> 00:22:50.719
Growing up in kindergarten, all through high school, everybody called me Jessy.
00:22:50.740 --> 00:22:52.719
That was my name for all intents and purposes.
00:22:53.179 --> 00:22:58.979
It wasn't until college, when I thought I was gonna make this big change, I wasn't gonna do that gay stuff.
00:22:59.380 --> 00:23:00.450
Which is so stupid.
00:23:00.940 --> 00:23:05.710
Looking back on it, I changed to Justin and I've been rocking Justin ever since.
