How Can You Tell You're Reading An Alicorn Story?

[Nemo]

Maybe they're just assuming the characters are female because of the first-person pronouns? It's the sort of mistake nobody would make consciously, but I could picture people thinking of that as a default.

[anthusiasm]

I've always felt like Cam voices are definitively more male than the average girl!Bell's. Is there something involved in the process of writing Cams that you can use other than the obvious thing? (I'm assuming that designing a female version of each male AUSJ persona is more work than you want to do with these).

(I don't think I've read any male AUSJ personas as explicitly female so I don't know how much help I'll be here, although I've mostly been skimming the recent ones. I love them, but there's just so many).

[Alicorn]

I've received a compliment on Cam being clearly male before, but one compliment - or even two - does not a fully-featured skillset make. I don't have any articulable hacks I'm using for him; he's "awake" in my head and that means less explicit reasoning on what he should be doing.

(People keep sending me asks! I have to answer them!)

[anthusiasm]

(I mean, it's not like I'm complaining, new content is great, it's just that I have zero attention span)

[DanielH]

I have been busy the past few days, but when I was last caught up I could only remember one person explicitly objecting to somebody gendering them (and even then didn’t say whether that gendering was correct). That was the potions AU, where an assumption of female makes sense for reasons other than voicing (because more people are straight than gay).

[Alicorn]

The potions AU presents you with two people, of whom exactly one is gay (well, the girlfriend could be bi either way). It doesn't make sense to assume the potionsona is female because lots of people are straight; if potionsona is female that implies the girlfriend can't be straight, whereas she can be if potionsona is male.

People usually don't gender the personae. @fucknodisparateimpact did out herself as a demigirl recently because someone accused her of having "cispinions" and that could not be allowed to stand, of course, but otherwise people usually seem willing to let them be.

[Paradox]

Several people are misreading AUSJ personae who were intended to be male and I haven't seen any misreadings in the other direction. Most of the AUSJ personae give no explicit tells, so this suggests some weakness in the voicing (even if it's a weakness that I normally cover for adequately by referring to characters by male pronouns and giving them masculine names).

I'm not sure the misreadings are because of a weakness in voicing male characters. Your fictional personae are writing about social justice and you said the posts are "published on a platform that is as similar to Tumblr as the world allows" and both tumblr and social justice blog posts are associated with women. I expect if you were instead writing AU sports posts and said the platform was as similar to reddit as the world allowed that you'd get people misreading female personae as male instead.

[PlainDealingVillain]

I think it's a combination of tumblr priors and first-person pronouns, probably. (So, what Paradox and Nemo said.)

[MaggieoftheOwls]

I've actually been reflexively gendering potionsona as male. Other than that...@Meow is female because she refers to herself as a grieving mommy, daemons I saw as female because there are more outspoken woman feminists than man ones, tethudian I was gendering as male, @knock-knock I was gendering as female, two-legs-good I don't think I had an opinion on, clonesona I was gendering as female, whatdidImiss male, ponysona female, aala and holiest blood I saw as official blogs that probably had more than one person manning them, uera agender because gender is a meatbag thing, mascot male, stitchybat male, thropes male.

[Alicorn]

Offical AUSJ Genders:

Girls:
#daemons
#tethudians
#elves
#ponies
#pixies
#cowbird

Undefined Even In My Head:
#mutants
#centaurs
#potions

Boys:
#chrononormativity
#mascots
#acolytes (it's a group blog but a dude mans the askbox and consults with the others)
#thropes

Other:
#clones (afab and presents pretty much like so, iffy genderfeels though)
#annihilation (identifies as a demigirl for reasons only loosely related to sincere genderfeels)
#adventurers (group blog)
#uera (genderless software, will take female pronouns from people who won't use "it" for persons because it appreciates the impulse to respect personhood in this way)