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How does Persona handle Sex and Gender? - Knowledgebase / Persona (Mac) - Mariner Software

How does Persona handle Sex and Gender?

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In several places, Persona designates gender for archetypes as Male or Female and allows users to specify whether or not a character's sex is Male, Female, or Other.

This is an article written to answer questions commonly asked about the way that Persona handles these things.

What do the gender distinctions Hero, Villain, Heroine, and Villainness mean, anyway?

They are a method we used to classify the archetypes we developed for the project:

  • Heroes - Heroic characters developed from a survey of characters traditionally understood as "male."

  • Villains - Villainous characters developed from a survey of characters traditionally understood as "male."

  • Heroines - Heroic characters developed from a survey of characters traditionally understood as "female."

  • Villainesses - Villainous characters developed from a survey of characters traditionally understood as "female."

Heroic characters are characters who the audience wants to see succeed.

Villainous characters are characters who antagonize (or oppose) a character the audience empathizes with.

Why provide any distinction between male and female archetypes, anyway?

In the development of content for Persona, we noticed a couple different specific things:

How can I use Persona without viewing archetypes sorted by gender?

  • Under Create Mode, it is possible to list archetypes sorted alphabetically.

  • Under Learn Mode, the ALL heading can be disclosed ("opened"), to dislpay a list of all archetypes, sorted alphabetically.

I have a character who identifies with gender or sex in a way that is not traditional. How do you suggest that I notate this for my character?

Currently, we are suggesting that users use one of the fields (such as Notes or Misc.) already provided within the program to track this information.

I have a character I've designated (in the Sex field) as Female. If I assign an archetype to her that Persona lists as Male (or Hero/ Villain), does this mean my character is male?

We don't think so. Although each archetype has been assigned a gender within the program's content, the program still allows users to define characters in any way they like.

Doesn't this seem conflicting?

We don't think this is conflicting. Gender designation for an archetype describe only the archetype; it does not necessarily describe a particular character.

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