You may have seen my earlier post about character types that we see most frequently on Birchwood Isle. I created that post in order to encourage people to avoid repetitive character types we see frequently. While there is nothing patently wrong with a seven-year-old little girl with dark hair, green eyes, and a big gap in her teeth, this has become the default character type that we see most often, and we'd like to encourage our members and potential members to fill some other voids.
In order to help potential members (and existing members making new characters) to determine what we need the most, this post will go through the specific needs and hopefully give you some specific ideas.
As always, we encourage our members to make the characters they are most comfortable playing, and to not push themselves to create a character just to fill a void!
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| CC BY-NC 2.0 |
#1 Little Boys
While we have an abundance of little girls, we do not have all that many little boys. This leaves the little boys (anywhere from 4 to 12 years old) without playmates, creating frustration for their players.
It also creates an unbalanced adoption situation, because as much as we recognize that most adopters seem to prefer female children, there are those among us (including both of our head admins) who prefer boy children over girl children.
We would like to see more boy children, but please note that we prefer that these children be played by those with confidence that they can play a boy who acts like a boy, and not a girl who has boy body parts.
If you are interested in playing a little boy between 4 and 12 years old, we'd love to have you! Please consider contacting someone on our administrative team about what you'd like to do and we can help you to get started with this type of character. Your own real-life gender doesn't matter!
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#2 High School Aged Teenagers
Our staff often gives shoutouts for more teenagers, because we need them in general. The response, more often than not, is seventh and eighth graders who are thirteen or fourteen years old. This is not what we're looking for. We would like to see more teenagers, for several reasons.Most importantly to us, teenagers provide friends for our inner teens. It's selfish, but it's true. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly to you, our head admins most want to adopt teenagers. Thirdly, and most important perhaps in general is that teenagers have access to the entire town, meaning their homes, their schools, and the businesses throughout town. They can work jobs, have a wider support network, and generally interact more than any other character group on Birchwood Isle.
If you feel comfortable playing a teenager, we highly recommend it. Teenage boys are of course always in higher demand than the girls, but we will be thrilled to accept teenagers of all genders, provided that they are of high school age. Please note that one or two more transgender teenagers would be interesting and add to our dynamic, if you are comfortable playing this scenario! We already have two one transgender and one genderfluid teenager on the island!
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| CC BY-NC 2.0 |
#3 Characters of Color
There is no question that the age play community is incredibly white washed. The administrative team cannot burden the sole responsibility for adding a diverse cast of faces to those played on Birchwood Isle, and our community (the whole community) includes people of all colors, all ethnicities, and body types.
Representation may be less important in our community than in the broader role play community, but it thrills me every time someone is interested in playing an Asian, African, or Hispanic character on Birchwood Isle. Whether your character is a child or an adult, we'd love to see some faces that mix it up a bit and add some more diversity to our cast!
Characters with body diversity are also more than welcome. Right now we can proudly state that we have dwarf characters and characters who are heavier of build. What we really need from you now is some more non-white characters so that we can avoid the great white wall that is so common in ageplay groups. If you need help choosing a face claim, please just ask! We have a list of faces we'd like to see in play.
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| CC BY-NC-SA |
#4 Older Adults
While age play is about playing your kids with their guardians and other adults, there is something nice about having older adults on the site as well. Right now our oldest character is 86 years old and a great-grandfather. We also have a 71 year-old great-grandfather who is a closeted homosexual.
Older adults are great for grandparent figures or for supplemental adults. They are also highly realistic. We don't currently have any older adults among our canon characters, so you'll have to come up with one on your own, but we'd love to have them!
We also welcome our members creating their own requested families. If you are interested in playing an older adult, you may wish to create him or her with a family of children, grandchildren, and potentially great-grandchildren as well.
Older adults enrich the environment that we have at Birchwood Isle and we think that you might enjoy playing them as much as we do! They can still work on the island, or may choose to live with family. One way or another, adults aged 60+ have few problems getting threads!
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