Queer Little Girl
At the center of it all.
It usually takes me time to get to the root of a project. I jump too far ahead, beginning without proper foundations, or I drift off course, getting lost in squalls of maybe this or maybe that. The pattern has held here. I know that I need to revisit the roots of my relationship to Dungeons & Dragons and chart an alternative and not-then-possible trajectory forward to a present, but I have approached that too abstractly. I have tried to think about the frontier or the city from a more mature intellectual place, but that's not where my relationship with these games begin.
The relationship begins with my childhood. Child me, whose femininity was a wounded and fugitive bird nestled in my heart. Child me, the little girl cursed into a little boy's life with no sense of how to escape. To find an affective and effective path forward, the first game I need to prepare is for her.
She is still furtive. So I turned to my Tarot cards to get a sense of the game she needed:
The Hierophant and the Devil form a striking pair—each forms of pairing, holy and unholy matrimonies joined together by the 4 of Wands. The Devil put me in mind of sexual abuse, a bit on the nose, and right away the sense of there being a place I felt inwardly for myself (queer little girl) and the way I was violated for trying to occupy that place.
Heavy. But I needed more to make sense of it, pulling the Princess of Swords and 5 of Wands. The Princess who holds to an internal conviction of what is right and proper in the face of those who argue otherwise, and the confusion of the 5 that can nonetheless be overcome by striving toward higher principle.
A game that says: "You can go out with noble intentions, be changed in ways that exceed your understanding of better and worse, and rediscover a new and laudable self-integrity." That's not quite a hero's journey, but it is definitely an adventurer's journey. The Princess of Swords, cunning and conflict ready, makes a wonderful adventurer's archetype. Princess of Swords, perhaps a good name for a queer little girl's D&D hack.
This provides me with a clear direction: circle back through my early experience of reading through monster manuals and fiend folios to recover a sense of how I was responding to what an encounter with a monster could be. Fighting really wasn't first on my list of go-to fantasies! Then start to contextualize those in dungeons and forests, building a little world outward from there.