rustingbridges:

can you give an example of a place in your writing where this motif appears? also I did not know you made games

Sadly, it’s kind of hard to just provide you with some text to read, which is obviously the correct thing to do here – most of my writing (prose fiction and game-writing both) is publicly associated with my general-purpose name, not with the Balioc handle.  But I can at least describe some of the stuff I’m talking about.  

One of my early LARPs is a weird hyperstylized gothic fairy tale thing.  The central backstory features a pair of best friends, a handsome warrior prince and a creepy demon-summoning sorcerer, who decide to go through the kidnap-and-rescue pageant with every lady in the land.  They think, basically, that it will be good for these ladies to be shown that they’re all worthy of playing the Maiden in the primal gender-trinary drama, so the two of them consciously take on the roles of the Hero and the Monster respectively.  Drama ensues when one of these girls decides that she’d prefer to stay with the sorcerer rather than getting rescued by the prince; this kicks off the plot events leading to the game.

Another LARP, written much later, has as its core flavor concept “magical girls if they were American twentysomethings instead of Japanese middle-schoolers.” 

This world has three forms of magic in it, two of which are heavily and explicitly gendered. 

The magical girls use female-coded magic (surprise!), even though they’re not absolutely always women.  They are the defenders of semi-real celestial paradise worlds that humans can visit in their dreams; they are all about protection and responsibility for others.  Also, their magical uniforms tend towards the classic Super Girly, with frills and short skirts etc. 

There are also arcane knights who use male-coded magic, even though they’re not absolutely always men.  They can turn their souls into swords, and are empowered to fight arcane duels for mysterious Grails; they are all about competition and self-exaltation.  Also, their magical uniforms tend towards a shojo anime’s idea of “classically masculine.” 

(The magical community of this world has invented a sort of hieros gamos ceremony to bring magical girls and knights together into Very Highly Gendered marriage-like relationships; the advantages and flaws of this system are a major topic of contention in the game.) 

The other magic-users, the so-called demiurges, aren’t gendered at all.  They are, however, very strongly coded as monstrous both by social convention and by metaphysics (although they are not absolutely always bad people).  Their magic allows them to overwrite sections of physical reality with their own imagined worlds; this is inherently aggressive/destructive, and also the imagined worlds in question tend to be pretty freaky and disturbing. 

So yeah.  Magic makes you either a prince, a princess, or a beast.