a hyperintelligent shade of blue <ilikemonkeys@geocities.com>
wrote:

> People are always asking me, "Voice of God, what is a good derangement
> for my malkavian? I want one that is easy to play, but hasn't been done to
> death." And then I say to them, "Well, you know, at one time, in fact, right
> around the time that your malkavian PC is supposed to be embraced, it was
> considered a mental illness to be a homosexual. Your Malkavian's derangement
> is "Gay". Go in peace, my child."

This is one of those topics I've been meaning to get around to
rambling about.  

First and foremost, I wouldn't have called it an easy-to-play
derangement.  Anyone who has been so traumatized, confused, or
otherwise turned around that their sexuality is governed by a
-derangement- is pretty thoroughly screwed.  Mentally, that is.

This is a derangement, we're talking about.  This is where the
blood of Malkav seeped into your mind and pried open a particular
door of perception.  It has coiled itself around a part of your
mind where it knows you're afraid to go in hopes you won't dig
too deeply to get it out.  It's a crack in the rock where it can
live, where you can't scrape it out, and where it can burrow
deeper into the firmament.  It's the path of least resistance,
where the blood trickles down through a channel carved by your
fears and philias.

And it's a game balance feature that feeds you storyteller plot-
hooks.

Regardless, there's a fissure in your character's mind that the
blood found its way into - and if it wasn't wide enough, it made
room.  The derangement is a derangement now, even if it started
as a simple crack.  The origin was probably nothing so simple as
'latent homosexuality,' but the blood found something to exploit.

The way I see it, someone who suffers from reversed sexuality as
a derangement probably had some little crack that had developed
in their life, even if it closed over and covered up.  Or there
was a single, significant traumatizing event.  Or a thoroughly
unhappy life in which a series of events brought the derangement
came into being.  

It may be something as subtle as a childhood promise that he
would never do -that- in his life that's come back into the
character's subconscious now that the character's undead - and
therefore past the prohibition.  Or it may be a response to the
pseudo-sexual ecstasy of being fed from by her sire.  Or it may
be that the character was so severely punished by a parent that
all of his life and unlife he's acted heterosexual out of devel-
opmental/emotional scars.  The side effects of childhood sexual
abuse can be driven into any direction with the help of the
blood.  Whatever it may have been or how well it's healed, the
blood's made a nest, the player's picked the derangement, and the
character's going to suffer it.

Beyond being gay or straight, there are dozens of sexual identity
disorders and causes.  Sexuality's an important, delicate part of
a sense of self, one that is easily identified as a target, by an
abuser, your own low self-esteem, or the blood of Malkav.


I agree with Mickey in that homosexuality isn't a derangement in
itself.  It wasn't magically freed from that status when the DSM
- III was printed and official reference to homosexuality as a
form of mental illness were relegated to DSM historical notes.  
Even so, there are as many folds to a mind as there are creases
in a brain hosting it, potentially making any form of sexuality
an expression of a damaged mind.  

Believe it or not, there's more to a derangement than symptomatic
behavior's cultural acceptance.


Vis Sierra
<vis@jps.net>