Rediscovery

It’s been a while since I did a ‘Tikaani’ post. So why the hell not.

I have been doing some re-examining on Tikaani’s sexuality and gender identity and it’s been pretty interesting and over frustrating. I am one of those kooky folks that see my muses having some sort of free will and usually have habit of telling me things that they want to tell me rather than me wanting to know. So I usually get a lot of interesting tibits useless info…like Tikaani not liking the color orange. 

He and Mai should hang out.

But his sexuality was a giant unknown and mostly I just throw darts at it until something sticks. For a while I thought he was rather ‘meh’ sexual. Like sex was ok to him but it wasn’t important or something he sought. But Tikaani has always been a sensory seeker. I mean when he was younger he wasn’t fond of touch until he was bit older. So now he enjoys cuddling, touching, and kissing. Those things, but actual intercourse didn’t matter. Until I started exploring a long-term relationship he has within the current canon of him being a shaman of the Northern Watertribe and him being in relationship with a deaf shaman and him learning a form of pidgin sign. It occurred he was pretty fucking kinky and totally ok with sex as a general note and that ‘sex’ to him wasn’t the same as it is to others. 

Themoreyouknow.

The more I prodded and pushed on him growing up and falling in love and dealing with people and relationships it became pretty clear that Tikaani was bisexual and homo-romantic. It seems he prefers courting men only because feels rather awkward around women. Tikaani is terrified at the thought of fathering anything. So eventually he sticks with courting men, only to avoid knocking someone up. He is pretty anxious around children. However he adored his second-cousin Uluu, despite being rather reactive around him as an infant and generally he gives most babies a wide berth. His partner on the other hand at one point desired children but relented to simply raising Uluu and staying at Tikaani’s side. 

Tikaani’s gender was also something of a mystery. Granted, he doesn’t care what pronouns you use, and he will probably use ‘boy’ in most circumstances but something jumped out of me as I continued to re-explore him. He was probably nongendered. Or rather apathetic to his gender, it was something that didn’t occur to me after working on him from sometime that his gender wasn’t important to him and that he will take on any role in the lodge. It’s something that I am still working on, but it’s pretty clear that he is not cis at all. 

Exploring a developed character can be enlightening and rewarding it’s also parallels real life, not everything you know about a person stays the same, everything can be dynamic and changing and it’s important to recognize that. It something to consider when you found our your friend is gay and your read him a straight (or hetronormative) when your friend is trans* and you read him as cis, or autistic and you read him as allistic. As someone that spent years writing Tikaani and discovering this strange muse of mind, I find it enjoyable to learn new things that I once thought it was obvious and right in front of me. Learning new things about old friends should have the same kind of joy.