Guest Post: I was a Lady of Sorrow
In 2021, separated by thousands of kilometers, and still dealing with travel difficulties from COVID, my partners and I decided to create a play by post RPG game as a way to stay connected. For me it was also a way to deal with my trauma around sexuality and feeling like I wasn’t allowed to be sexual. I have a hundred things I would love to talk about with that game, but my feelings around it are incredibly complex. Maybe someday.
I've been reading blog posts recently, always a dangerous pastime, and was really struck by Lost Girls by Weird Writer and the Princess Class by Havoc. The character I was playing fit somehow right between these two visions.
I played a woman named Valeria suffering a vampiric curse, alongside my two partners. Valeria was magically bound to a lunar goddess called the Deep Mother. The Deep Mother was both midwife and funerary attendant, and cycled between her two rules depending on the moon phase. Valeria in turn cycled through bouts of manic sexuality and vampirism.
Jenx argues with the Deep Mother over Valeria’s magical contract.
Valeria was absolutely a Princess. She was absolutely not a Lost Girl. She was a Lady of Sorrow.
Valeria was a “Princess”
Recently Havoc posted the wonderful Princess class on their blog, and I am struck by how similar Valeria’s character was to this concept. Valeria was inherently non violent. She relied on her deep bonds with others for physical protection. The true and deep love her companions had for her was her most powerful defense.
Her magic did not take the form of spell casting. In fact in our game it was a stated point that the Wizard Jenx could not teach her magic. His magic was external and destructive. He was/is the classic fantasy wizard. Valeria's magic was entirely empathy based, and often involved gentle acts like braiding hair, softly humming, and deep care towards others. She could feel what others felt. Valeria's power was sharing her sense of sonder with others, and filling them with a profound sense of love and care.
In Havoc’s Princess Class there is a “Love Saves All” mechanic where the princess can use her kindness and insight towards others to show them the “error of their ways.” This was also how I played Valeria. It was not always about correcting others. Sometimes it was providing comfort, other times healing from trauma, but always it was love first and foremost.
In the culmination of the game she gave birth to a new moon goddess, thus freeing herself from her curse via an act of love, and a feminine magic.
The Anti Lost Girl
Valeria wasn't a Lost Girl. Not because she couldn't have been, but because her world rose up to protect her when Lost Girls never receive that kindness. She was, however, a Lady of Sorrow for a long time. Valeria’s story was one of overcoming the vampiric nature forced upon her.
Both games explore the pain of living in a femme body in a world that seeks to own and exploit them. In the real world softness and vulnerability are at best seen as shameful and at worst active invitations to harm. Lost Girls explores this through a violent trans-centric lens. It slams itself into the worst this world has to offer and screams in the face of that pain. It openly engages in destructive sex and in doing so forces the reader to acknowledge the reality of those behaviors and the horrors that cause them.
That was not how I explored sex in my game. Instead it was about learning to trust that it could be soft and safe again. Both the violence of Lost Girls, and the radical empathy of my game spit in the face at the harm society seeks to inflict on feminine bodies. We live in a world that controls girls by calling our bodies dirty, and our emotions and desires shameful and humiliating. It tells us that no matter what we do, we are failing at performing “woman”.
My vampire wasn't an allegory for a patriarchal system of oppression and exploitation. She was the trauma of my perceived lack of womanliness. That vampire lives in the stroke induced dark spots of my brain, and will forever be telling me I am not good enough to be a proper woman.
Girlhood with all the sweetness that implies is a vulnerability in a world that is actively predatory against it. Sure that shouldn't be how life works but it's dishonest to pretend it's otherwise. Those who claim this isn't true have lived in a privileged bubble.
In my game I approached this fundamental unfairness by becoming softer instead of harder. Valeria never gained the power to fight back. Instead she gained the power I long for, the power the Princess Class holds, to soften the world instead of fight it, and to hold my vampire with love and tell her she’s enough even if she thinks I’m not.
-Missus Mister Jenx's Wife