My Hobby: Wryly smirking at people’s obsession with homoromantic subtext, while writing three major male characters who are exceptionally guilty of it.
(To be fair, one doesn’t realise it and would be appalled if he did, one is above caring about such things, and the third describes himself as omnisexual but is really just foul. With him it’s not so much subtext as nobody believing a dog is really chatting them up.)
Being as how my own orientation points strongly towards the siblinghood and bromance side of things, while I’m not above flirting with the idea (especially for laughs!), the relationships I really want to write about are complicated, banter-filled, occasionally fraught or downright confusing to both participants and onlookers, but never all-sex-all-the-time.
That being said, do note what I’m very carefully avoiding denying outright, and therefore please don’t take this as a cue to stop speculating or indeed writing slash fic, because that would just be no fun at all.
That’s not to say some of my characters don’t enjoy happy, normal romantic-sexual relationships too. Suitov is seeing Jaina, and Paraskive is cougaring (she’d slap me for that, and quite right too) a delightful postman toy boy named Alisander. One of these relationships will end badly owing to Suitov being, well, honestly, pretty bloody idiotic for a supposed genius, and the other may be strained when their island is put under martial law, but we’ll see. And among my backstory and minor characters, of course, there are plenty of successful hetero, homo and even xeno relationships. (Instarrian boys loooove them alien womens. Quite often for a price.)
There’s the added complication of pairing roleplay characters up. If you pair yours off with someone else’s, and they’re infrequently around, it can cause frustration and slow down a plot. If you pair one of yours off with another of yours, it can become a bit like brainwanking, restricting the opportunities for other people’s characters to engage with yours. I don’t have an easy answer for this one. I sometimes write an NPC partner in for a character, or make it explicitly asexual or celibate, simply to avoid having to write too much about romance.
