Aesthetics and Culture

In order to make my concept appealing to my target audience of the LGBTQ+ community, I would like to base my characters on realistic queer subcultures and try to include as many different types of queer people as possible. Looking at resources online, there are many different subcultures (queer or otherwise) for me to choose between. Here are some of my personal favourites:

• Bear - a larger, more typically masculine, older gay man

• Hunk/Jock - A more muscular gay man

• Twink - A more effeminate, often younger gay man

• Twunk - A combination of a twink and a hunk; younger, but often more muscular and lean

• Wolves - The middle ground between bears and twinks; leaner and smaller, but still muscular

• Otter - A more slender or lean, typically younger version of a bear

• Silver fox - An older gay man, often with grey or silver hair

As well as each of these characters being a different type of gay subculture, I would also quite like to look into alternative fashion and mindsets when building these characters. There is a pretty much endless amount of alternative subcultures, as each culture has multiple different subcultures branching out of itself, and new ones are being created every day. Alt cultures are defined by many things: attitude, music, fashion, culture, gender, and sexuality. They are all united, however, by the desire to stand out and be different. For the sake of simplicity, I will be looking only at alternative cultures in regards to fashion, some examples of which include:

1. Cyber - Dressing in neon colours to appear futuristic

2. Goth - A style that includes almost entirely monochrome clothes, often inspired by Victorian/Edwardian attire, with heavy, feature-changing makeup

3. Lolita - Cutesy fashion originating in Japan that takes inspiration from Victorian or Edwardian attire

4. Emo - Characterised by almost entirely black clothes, a specific genre of emotional rock music and their graphic tees, and choppy hair

5. Scene - Similar to emo in shape and style, but with brighter colours and a more indie/rave-inspired music taste

6. Punk - Can mean many different things, but tends to be a bright mixture of spikes, leather, and outlandish hair and makeup, often black with small pops of bright neon colour

7. Hippie - Colourful, psychedelic, often baggy clothes

8. Grunge - A style that came directly out of grunge music, characterised by unkempt streetwear and big, clunky Doc Martins

You can see examples of what these alternative subcultures might look like to the left, numbered in the order show in the list. I'd love to try to incorporate some of these fashion movements into my characters.