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permissions/cw/opt out
warnings.
| SPECIFIC NOTES: | tone. health, diabetes stigma, & fatphobia. military participation. mental illness. weight. linguistic/cultural. |
in general. Please be advised that Freddie's character comes with some fairly dark and potentially triggering themes that can't really be neatly extracted from the person he is: bulimia with emeto, internalized fatphobia/low self worth, US intervention in the Middle East, cheating, diabetes stigma, questions of Québécois identity and ethnic tension in Canada, and dental damage/pain/decay/erosion (without traumatic injury - I am actually very squeamish about dental stuff).
Respect for a hard OOC/IC divide is a must when interacting with this character; Freddie has a lot of opinions and problematic beliefs that do not align with my own, and though he (hopefully) pings as fairly realistic in his assorted issues and life experiences because of a lot of research on my part and inspiration drawn from a number of real-life accounts, I'm not using him to write about anything that's happened in my own life.
I don't tag out without warning/asking because of the nature of this character, and I have an opt out at the bottom of this page. I get that this sort of character isn't everyone's bag and I'm not here to force anyone to play against me or push boundaries — you don't have to write against me or this character if you don't want to and I'm not going to judge people for not wanting to engage when they're decent to me, the person writing the character. I'm just here to have a good time and write about topics that are interesting to me - I'd like to hope that if people don't agree with these issues being portrayed in fiction or are personally offended by my choice to write about them, they can make the personal choice not to write with me and proceed to live and let live and let myself and my rp partners enjoy ourselves in peace.
While I see Freddie as ultimately recovering from his eating disorder—at the canonpoint I play him at, his body has reached the point of only being able to take about another month of this before he ends up in the hospital, and he's going to go through a recovery arc early in any game—I made this character to write about a number of real life social issues that are very interesting and important to me and often under-examined all sort of convening together in one person's life. Because Freddie is a very contemporary character with a web of connections to different real-life issues, he may not be fun for everyone to play against in a hobby that offers varying levels of escapism; if that's you, there's an opt-out at the bottom of this page, judgment-free.
Some of the point of this character, as much as a character can have a 'point' outside of a fixed narrative, is that he's an example of what can happen with fatphobia in the aviation industry, diabetes stigma keeping people from actually getting treatment, and how diet culture and extremes driven by fatphobia are very much able to kill somebody and do much more harm to their body faster than or more than the original "problem" of weight was able to. I wanted to write about a character with an unglamorous eating disorder who is harmed by the aesthetic Black Swan hollywood stereotype in that he goes undetected largely because people have been taught that an eating disorder patient has one look—so the level of destruction he manages to inflict upon his own body is much higher because nobody notices things they might be more suspicious of if he were model-thin, or female, or younger, or in a less hypermasculine career, even though his individual case is pretty typical among the ~1/3rd of bulimia patients who identify as male. Freddie's background is meant to be realistic as opposed to sanitized of uncomfortable themes or deliberately uplifting, even if he as an individual does eventually recover.
tone & irreverence. Freddie tends to be a little wry, a little deadpan in the way he thinks about his issues; as a writer I shape narrative text around how the individual thinks of the things happening around them and how that filters through their unique consciousness. Point being: at times the narrative around Freddie's insulin resistance, bulimia, dental issues, and complicated relationship with his own ethnoreligious background may be a little irreverent, self-effacing, and/or flat. This is reflective of a fairly typical coping mechanism, not ooc attitudes on very irl serious themes.
on health, diabetes stigma, & fatphobia. The way that Freddie developed IR/prediabetes was causative because of genetic predisposition, i.e., a gene-environment interaction. Many people without genetic factors at play are able to consistently maintain a similar diet and have no issues; he just isn't one of them. This very much is not me, the writer, saying anyone who drinks a non-diet Coke is going to develop IR/diabetes, that all fat people are unhealthy (his health issues are unrelated to weight), or that anyone can just Give Themselves Diabetes TM by consuming too much sugar.
Insulin resistance is a very complex condition and so is Type 2; we don't know exactly what causes it because it's a multifaceted G/E interface. I ended up finding out after I started writing him that I have adult onset Type 1, which plurk friends may see me talk about - but it's very important to me to emphasize that I do not share the stigmatizing, discriminatory beliefs of many people with the same illness who feel that T2D isn't 'real', that it's 'self-inflicted', etc etc, and to make mention that I'm not using him to write about my own issues any more than a woman writing a female character or a gay person writing a gay character is.
modern military participation. Freddie is also a pretty classic case of the US military using debt and tuition expenses as a recruiting tool—most American pilots in real life get their wings by going through the military—and desensitization to civilian death. His character isn't meant as apologia; he's a reflection of the reality in his industry. He didn't come into a recruiter's office rubbing his hands together and very consciously deciding "I'm going to potentially kill civilians as fringe casualties so that I can go to flight school"; most people in real life don't. His 21-year-old line of thought, having grown up in an extremely militarized country during the Iraq War, was "I want to fly planes and the Air Force will teach me to fly planes". It was a privilege of being a white American with two parents from North America that he was able to not think about the repercussions this choice would have on people in other countries that were very abstract to him if the US decided to initiate foreign military intervention as it did shortly after he signed on.
Freddie's hand wasn't the one that pulled the proverbial trigger when his aircraft dropped bombs—he 'just flew the plane'—but his role was necessary to enable to Weapons Systems Officer onboard to initiate the release. He was a participant in the killing, regardless of how low intelligence officers and the little voice in his own head told him civilian fringe casualties would be. If the narrative brings it up, Freddie may reflect on his time in Iraq and in Syria during "Inherent Resolve", especially the Battle of Mosul, which involved massive destruction and loss of civilian lives in the thousands. While he's a little uncomfortable with some of the things he did, he's not repentant and feels like he did the right thing. Freddie was also up in a bomber and unable to see individual people when he killed, let alone look them in the eyes, which factors into this. Point being: he may speak about the Middle East/North Africa/West Asia in ways you would expect an American GI on the more left/educated end of the spectrum to speak about them, and he's pro-US intervention.
mental illness. Freddie is also an unreliable narrator. By this point in his bulimia/orthorexia, he's very mentally ill. He has a lot of dimension beyond his (pending) diagnosis and is a person with traits and interests outside of his mental illness, and every single tag isn't just him railing on how much he hates himself or thinking bulimic thoughts, but he isn't a neurotypical character who just happens to eat too much and purge offscreen sometimes. As is the case in the real world, his eating disorder bleeds into his daily life - his daily routines, how he perceives the world, how he perceives other people and interprets what they're saying. His thoughts are obsessive, and his perception of reality and his body is a little warped. He perceives himself as heavier and unhealthier than he is while writing off the real issues (bodily damage from purging and refusing to take his insulin sensitizer) by either ignoring them, downplaying them, calling them a necessary evil, or attributing them to his being overweight.
He truly believes that he is purging for his health to mitigate the damage everything he just binged on will do to his body (and more specifically, his blood sugar), and it's not an easy fix—while I do see him eventually (mostly) recovering and am definitely interested in playing that out, he's so dug in at this point and so incredibly fear-motivated that it would take a lot of deliberate work and a lot of counseling and most likely treatment on SSRIs to break him out of this cycle.
notes on weight. Even with recovery, I have zero plans for Freddie to lose weight, because it was never the actual medical issue, it would realistically be very very difficult for him due to the insulin resistance, and recovery for him means allowing himself to simply exist as he is. He simply will never be able to engage in Lose Weight On Purpose without defaulting to extremely unhealthy thought patterns and behaviors very quickly, and recovery for him specifically will always mean staying far, far away from that rhetoric and industry.
OOCly I also just always pictured the character as someone softer and am tired of arcs where the character "fixing" themselves means losing weight, and there is a very rigid standard of thinness in the aviation industry that's an IRL problem that leads to people with issues like Freddie's, some of whom I've known personally—plus I just think it's kind of neat to have a character out there who doesn't conform to the image of the slim, toned pilot and is just as good at what he does in an industry that heavily equates thinness to competence.
linguistic/cultural notes. Like Freddie, I'm a French speaker, but I speak Belgian/African French (local social work reasons, not missionary/voluntourism reasons), which is a very different dialect with different linguistic rules. I've had a lot of exposure to French Canadian culture because of where I live—depending on source, my state has somewhere between the first to fourth-highest concentration of members of the French-Canadian diaspora in the country—and I largely base his father's lived experience/what Freddie grew up being told in the firsthand accounts I've heard from the specifically Québécois Gen-X French-Canadians in my life, but I don't share in that half of his ethnic background and may get details or turns of phrase wrong! Please don't hesitate to lmk if I miss the mark!
It's important to note that not everyone who immigrates to the US, especially people who never take the exam to naturalize (his father is only a LPR), ever reach a native speaker's level of fluency, and many gen-X Québécois French speakers either never learned English—Canada has two official languages, and generally speaking, signage in the surrounding Anglophone areas tends to include French—or learned it later in life, as was the case with Matthieu. Freddie's relationship with his father is complicated in general, but some of what he, a fluent English speaker and an American, interprets as Matthieu "being difficult" or reinforcing stereotypes of the rude French-Canadian when "he can speak English just fine when he wants to" is just stress, annoyance, frustration, or embarrassment when he cannot communicate with Anglophones in a way that accurately conveys his thoughts and sentiments and personality.
Freddie also has a little embarrassment/shame at being the child of an immigrant who very much never assimilated—while this doesn't carry the same stigma as it would were his father a man of color or from a country outside of America's immediate western allies, the fact that he is ESL and clearly speaking a second language when he speaks in English makes the situation slightly different than it would be for someone whose parent was an Anglo-Canadian immigrant. In English, his father has an accent entirely different than the stereotypical 'Canadian' accent and one would have to have heard a Francophone Québécois person speak English to really know where that accent is coming from because of just how distinct it is - even compared to a French or Belgian accent - so he just sort of sounds ambiguously European. Freddie may, at times, use the phrase 'fresh off the boat'/FOB/FOBby to describe his father in a derogatory manner, although he never directs it at any other immigrants. I warn for this in subject lines.
Like a lot of people in the French diaspora, Freddie refers to Anglo-Canadians with the shorthand Anglos; while it can be contextually inflammatory and he does sometimes mean it with a degree of exasperation, it's mostly just shorthand to differentiate the cultural majority group in the way goyim or gringos might be used. Out of an abundance of caution I still give a heads up in the subject line when he says it.
Respect for a hard OOC/IC divide is a must when interacting with this character; Freddie has a lot of opinions and problematic beliefs that do not align with my own, and though he (hopefully) pings as fairly realistic in his assorted issues and life experiences because of a lot of research on my part and inspiration drawn from a number of real-life accounts, I'm not using him to write about anything that's happened in my own life.
I don't tag out without warning/asking because of the nature of this character, and I have an opt out at the bottom of this page. I get that this sort of character isn't everyone's bag and I'm not here to force anyone to play against me or push boundaries — you don't have to write against me or this character if you don't want to and I'm not going to judge people for not wanting to engage when they're decent to me, the person writing the character. I'm just here to have a good time and write about topics that are interesting to me - I'd like to hope that if people don't agree with these issues being portrayed in fiction or are personally offended by my choice to write about them, they can make the personal choice not to write with me and proceed to live and let live and let myself and my rp partners enjoy ourselves in peace.
While I see Freddie as ultimately recovering from his eating disorder—at the canonpoint I play him at, his body has reached the point of only being able to take about another month of this before he ends up in the hospital, and he's going to go through a recovery arc early in any game—I made this character to write about a number of real life social issues that are very interesting and important to me and often under-examined all sort of convening together in one person's life. Because Freddie is a very contemporary character with a web of connections to different real-life issues, he may not be fun for everyone to play against in a hobby that offers varying levels of escapism; if that's you, there's an opt-out at the bottom of this page, judgment-free.
Some of the point of this character, as much as a character can have a 'point' outside of a fixed narrative, is that he's an example of what can happen with fatphobia in the aviation industry, diabetes stigma keeping people from actually getting treatment, and how diet culture and extremes driven by fatphobia are very much able to kill somebody and do much more harm to their body faster than or more than the original "problem" of weight was able to. I wanted to write about a character with an unglamorous eating disorder who is harmed by the aesthetic Black Swan hollywood stereotype in that he goes undetected largely because people have been taught that an eating disorder patient has one look—so the level of destruction he manages to inflict upon his own body is much higher because nobody notices things they might be more suspicious of if he were model-thin, or female, or younger, or in a less hypermasculine career, even though his individual case is pretty typical among the ~1/3rd of bulimia patients who identify as male. Freddie's background is meant to be realistic as opposed to sanitized of uncomfortable themes or deliberately uplifting, even if he as an individual does eventually recover.
tone & irreverence. Freddie tends to be a little wry, a little deadpan in the way he thinks about his issues; as a writer I shape narrative text around how the individual thinks of the things happening around them and how that filters through their unique consciousness. Point being: at times the narrative around Freddie's insulin resistance, bulimia, dental issues, and complicated relationship with his own ethnoreligious background may be a little irreverent, self-effacing, and/or flat. This is reflective of a fairly typical coping mechanism, not ooc attitudes on very irl serious themes.
on health, diabetes stigma, & fatphobia. The way that Freddie developed IR/prediabetes was causative because of genetic predisposition, i.e., a gene-environment interaction. Many people without genetic factors at play are able to consistently maintain a similar diet and have no issues; he just isn't one of them. This very much is not me, the writer, saying anyone who drinks a non-diet Coke is going to develop IR/diabetes, that all fat people are unhealthy (his health issues are unrelated to weight), or that anyone can just Give Themselves Diabetes TM by consuming too much sugar.
Insulin resistance is a very complex condition and so is Type 2; we don't know exactly what causes it because it's a multifaceted G/E interface. I ended up finding out after I started writing him that I have adult onset Type 1, which plurk friends may see me talk about - but it's very important to me to emphasize that I do not share the stigmatizing, discriminatory beliefs of many people with the same illness who feel that T2D isn't 'real', that it's 'self-inflicted', etc etc, and to make mention that I'm not using him to write about my own issues any more than a woman writing a female character or a gay person writing a gay character is.
modern military participation. Freddie is also a pretty classic case of the US military using debt and tuition expenses as a recruiting tool—most American pilots in real life get their wings by going through the military—and desensitization to civilian death. His character isn't meant as apologia; he's a reflection of the reality in his industry. He didn't come into a recruiter's office rubbing his hands together and very consciously deciding "I'm going to potentially kill civilians as fringe casualties so that I can go to flight school"; most people in real life don't. His 21-year-old line of thought, having grown up in an extremely militarized country during the Iraq War, was "I want to fly planes and the Air Force will teach me to fly planes". It was a privilege of being a white American with two parents from North America that he was able to not think about the repercussions this choice would have on people in other countries that were very abstract to him if the US decided to initiate foreign military intervention as it did shortly after he signed on.
Freddie's hand wasn't the one that pulled the proverbial trigger when his aircraft dropped bombs—he 'just flew the plane'—but his role was necessary to enable to Weapons Systems Officer onboard to initiate the release. He was a participant in the killing, regardless of how low intelligence officers and the little voice in his own head told him civilian fringe casualties would be. If the narrative brings it up, Freddie may reflect on his time in Iraq and in Syria during "Inherent Resolve", especially the Battle of Mosul, which involved massive destruction and loss of civilian lives in the thousands. While he's a little uncomfortable with some of the things he did, he's not repentant and feels like he did the right thing. Freddie was also up in a bomber and unable to see individual people when he killed, let alone look them in the eyes, which factors into this. Point being: he may speak about the Middle East/North Africa/West Asia in ways you would expect an American GI on the more left/educated end of the spectrum to speak about them, and he's pro-US intervention.
mental illness. Freddie is also an unreliable narrator. By this point in his bulimia/orthorexia, he's very mentally ill. He has a lot of dimension beyond his (pending) diagnosis and is a person with traits and interests outside of his mental illness, and every single tag isn't just him railing on how much he hates himself or thinking bulimic thoughts, but he isn't a neurotypical character who just happens to eat too much and purge offscreen sometimes. As is the case in the real world, his eating disorder bleeds into his daily life - his daily routines, how he perceives the world, how he perceives other people and interprets what they're saying. His thoughts are obsessive, and his perception of reality and his body is a little warped. He perceives himself as heavier and unhealthier than he is while writing off the real issues (bodily damage from purging and refusing to take his insulin sensitizer) by either ignoring them, downplaying them, calling them a necessary evil, or attributing them to his being overweight.
He truly believes that he is purging for his health to mitigate the damage everything he just binged on will do to his body (and more specifically, his blood sugar), and it's not an easy fix—while I do see him eventually (mostly) recovering and am definitely interested in playing that out, he's so dug in at this point and so incredibly fear-motivated that it would take a lot of deliberate work and a lot of counseling and most likely treatment on SSRIs to break him out of this cycle.
notes on weight. Even with recovery, I have zero plans for Freddie to lose weight, because it was never the actual medical issue, it would realistically be very very difficult for him due to the insulin resistance, and recovery for him means allowing himself to simply exist as he is. He simply will never be able to engage in Lose Weight On Purpose without defaulting to extremely unhealthy thought patterns and behaviors very quickly, and recovery for him specifically will always mean staying far, far away from that rhetoric and industry.
OOCly I also just always pictured the character as someone softer and am tired of arcs where the character "fixing" themselves means losing weight, and there is a very rigid standard of thinness in the aviation industry that's an IRL problem that leads to people with issues like Freddie's, some of whom I've known personally—plus I just think it's kind of neat to have a character out there who doesn't conform to the image of the slim, toned pilot and is just as good at what he does in an industry that heavily equates thinness to competence.
linguistic/cultural notes. Like Freddie, I'm a French speaker, but I speak Belgian/African French (local social work reasons, not missionary/voluntourism reasons), which is a very different dialect with different linguistic rules. I've had a lot of exposure to French Canadian culture because of where I live—depending on source, my state has somewhere between the first to fourth-highest concentration of members of the French-Canadian diaspora in the country—and I largely base his father's lived experience/what Freddie grew up being told in the firsthand accounts I've heard from the specifically Québécois Gen-X French-Canadians in my life, but I don't share in that half of his ethnic background and may get details or turns of phrase wrong! Please don't hesitate to lmk if I miss the mark!
It's important to note that not everyone who immigrates to the US, especially people who never take the exam to naturalize (his father is only a LPR), ever reach a native speaker's level of fluency, and many gen-X Québécois French speakers either never learned English—Canada has two official languages, and generally speaking, signage in the surrounding Anglophone areas tends to include French—or learned it later in life, as was the case with Matthieu. Freddie's relationship with his father is complicated in general, but some of what he, a fluent English speaker and an American, interprets as Matthieu "being difficult" or reinforcing stereotypes of the rude French-Canadian when "he can speak English just fine when he wants to" is just stress, annoyance, frustration, or embarrassment when he cannot communicate with Anglophones in a way that accurately conveys his thoughts and sentiments and personality.
Freddie also has a little embarrassment/shame at being the child of an immigrant who very much never assimilated—while this doesn't carry the same stigma as it would were his father a man of color or from a country outside of America's immediate western allies, the fact that he is ESL and clearly speaking a second language when he speaks in English makes the situation slightly different than it would be for someone whose parent was an Anglo-Canadian immigrant. In English, his father has an accent entirely different than the stereotypical 'Canadian' accent and one would have to have heard a Francophone Québécois person speak English to really know where that accent is coming from because of just how distinct it is - even compared to a French or Belgian accent - so he just sort of sounds ambiguously European. Freddie may, at times, use the phrase 'fresh off the boat'/FOB/FOBby to describe his father in a derogatory manner, although he never directs it at any other immigrants. I warn for this in subject lines.
Like a lot of people in the French diaspora, Freddie refers to Anglo-Canadians with the shorthand Anglos; while it can be contextually inflammatory and he does sometimes mean it with a degree of exasperation, it's mostly just shorthand to differentiate the cultural majority group in the way goyim or gringos might be used. Out of an abundance of caution I still give a heads up in the subject line when he says it.
Physical Affection: Yes.
Fighting, verbal or physical: Go for it! I prefer in the case of serious physical fights to discuss via PM to rough sketch a sort of choreography and decide how we want it to go.
Killing: No.
Mind Reading/Jedi Mind Trick/Mind Control: No.
Empathy (reading emotions only): With discussion.
Threadhopping: Ask first!
Smut/FTB: Case dependent. I prefer to FTB if nothing particularly interesting kinkwise or emotionally is going on. I have smut info for him here.
OOC limits for me — tornadoes (other natural disasters fine), dental trauma (like broken teeth), nail/toe/eye trauma, large age gaps/predatory age gap relationships/underage with an adult party (if your character has that kind of CR in a game, please just don't bring it up around me; as part of character backstory it's fine if it's treated realistically), dog/horse death or extreme dog/horse abuse.
Special Notes: Please let me know if your character has a naturally soft or quieter voice, or tends to mumble/doesn't enunciate - Freddie is hard-of-hearing and cannot make out individual words if someone is mumbling, needs subtitles, can't sift out a quiet/moderately low voice in a loud setting, and will have to ask very quiet characters to repeat themselves.
Unless the person being cheated on was abusive, he is not capable of positive or neutral CR with characters he knows have cheated. His first approach is to disengage and leave, but if he is put in a situation in which he can't leave the interaction, he's liable to take his trauma from his own experience being cheated on out on that character as though they harmed him personally.
Fighting, verbal or physical: Go for it! I prefer in the case of serious physical fights to discuss via PM to rough sketch a sort of choreography and decide how we want it to go.
Killing: No.
Mind Reading/Jedi Mind Trick/Mind Control: No.
Empathy (reading emotions only): With discussion.
Threadhopping: Ask first!
Smut/FTB: Case dependent. I prefer to FTB if nothing particularly interesting kinkwise or emotionally is going on. I have smut info for him here.
OOC limits for me — tornadoes (other natural disasters fine), dental trauma (like broken teeth), nail/toe/eye trauma, large age gaps/predatory age gap relationships/underage with an adult party (if your character has that kind of CR in a game, please just don't bring it up around me; as part of character backstory it's fine if it's treated realistically), dog/horse death or extreme dog/horse abuse.
Special Notes: Please let me know if your character has a naturally soft or quieter voice, or tends to mumble/doesn't enunciate - Freddie is hard-of-hearing and cannot make out individual words if someone is mumbling, needs subtitles, can't sift out a quiet/moderately low voice in a loud setting, and will have to ask very quiet characters to repeat themselves.
Unless the person being cheated on was abusive, he is not capable of positive or neutral CR with characters he knows have cheated. His first approach is to disengage and leave, but if he is put in a situation in which he can't leave the interaction, he's liable to take his trauma from his own experience being cheated on out on that character as though they harmed him personally.
Freddie is bisexual and selectively out. He's not out at work, but if someone directly asks "Do you like men?", he'll say yes. However, he's openly on Tinder, Grindr, etc with men enabled, so if you work around him and you have men turned on, you're liable to see his profiles.
He has a little bit of internalized societal homophobia coming out of the military—no religious hangups—but it's pretty mild, mostly things like not wanting to be "seen as The Girl", etc.
I think he's centrist enough to be put off by androgynous presentation from any gender - for instance, women don't have to be ultrafemme to him, but a butch dyke would do absolutely nothing for him. I think he'd initially be hesitant about being with a nonbinary character and would have to sort of get caught up on things and process the whole idea of nonbinary genders, but it's possible. He's not any more or any less attracted to trans characters than he is cis characters.
Poly relationships are a hard no for him for a multitude of reasons, but Freddie is very promiscuous across multiple partners; he flirts and goes out with multiple people concurrently because he knows, deep down, that none of them are going to become serious. His usual MO is to match on a dating app (or, rarer, at a bar or at some meetcute), go on a date and-or fuck 2 or 3 times, then cut it off—even if he doesn't want to cut it off, even if there's real chemistry involved.
In a game setting, please understand that ic flirtation, passes, or even efforts to sleep with a character don't automatically equate to ooc interest in a ship! I am a very direct communicator and will approach you oocly if I'm interested in potentially playing out more than them just fucking around. Though by necessity with the passing of time I plan on having him go through a recovery era ingame—he only has a month of his behavior left before he ends up in the hospital, and he's very close to his 'wake up call' moment at his default canonpoint—which will likely make it possible to avoid the subject of ED mentions/internalized fatphobia in gen threads, I am only interested in shipping him against characters played by writers who are able/willing to engage with the entirety of the character without specific topic opt-outs - even once he recovers, his history will always be a part of the totality of who he is in a way that would come up with a romantic partner.
I won't play love triangles or characters being in competition for the same prospective partner in games - I've written the party who's left proverbially empty-handed a few times and it's just not fun to me. When characters are both vying for the same partner and both have chemistry with the party in question, I feel like it disincentivizes slowburn and gradual bonding, which is how I like to play out ships, so if a character has a fair amount of chemistry with another PC already I'm generally not interested in playing out a "who will they end up with" scenario.
This isn't to say that I'll only write Freddie crushing on or thirsting over characters he is able or guaranteed to end up in a relationship with - but I like to decide whether it will for sure be a dead-end/goes nowhere situation or if the character has the capacity to return those feelings/there is a possibility of things developing ahead of time so that everyone's on the same page. I think that CR can absolutely still organically develop and take unexpected turns, especially with events thrown in the mix, whilst still having a general idea of potential outcomes - though I like to plot and plan, I'm not into rigidly deciding every detail of how something will develop and forcing CR in the originally decided direction if it no longer makes sense, but usually with partners I like to think about likely vibes and then plot out how we can cultivate that, discuss whether or not we want to do things that would derail that trajectory, etc.
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opt-out.
He has a little bit of internalized societal homophobia coming out of the military—no religious hangups—but it's pretty mild, mostly things like not wanting to be "seen as The Girl", etc.
I think he's centrist enough to be put off by androgynous presentation from any gender - for instance, women don't have to be ultrafemme to him, but a butch dyke would do absolutely nothing for him. I think he'd initially be hesitant about being with a nonbinary character and would have to sort of get caught up on things and process the whole idea of nonbinary genders, but it's possible. He's not any more or any less attracted to trans characters than he is cis characters.
Poly relationships are a hard no for him for a multitude of reasons, but Freddie is very promiscuous across multiple partners; he flirts and goes out with multiple people concurrently because he knows, deep down, that none of them are going to become serious. His usual MO is to match on a dating app (or, rarer, at a bar or at some meetcute), go on a date and-or fuck 2 or 3 times, then cut it off—even if he doesn't want to cut it off, even if there's real chemistry involved.
In a game setting, please understand that ic flirtation, passes, or even efforts to sleep with a character don't automatically equate to ooc interest in a ship! I am a very direct communicator and will approach you oocly if I'm interested in potentially playing out more than them just fucking around. Though by necessity with the passing of time I plan on having him go through a recovery era ingame—he only has a month of his behavior left before he ends up in the hospital, and he's very close to his 'wake up call' moment at his default canonpoint—which will likely make it possible to avoid the subject of ED mentions/internalized fatphobia in gen threads, I am only interested in shipping him against characters played by writers who are able/willing to engage with the entirety of the character without specific topic opt-outs - even once he recovers, his history will always be a part of the totality of who he is in a way that would come up with a romantic partner.
I won't play love triangles or characters being in competition for the same prospective partner in games - I've written the party who's left proverbially empty-handed a few times and it's just not fun to me. When characters are both vying for the same partner and both have chemistry with the party in question, I feel like it disincentivizes slowburn and gradual bonding, which is how I like to play out ships, so if a character has a fair amount of chemistry with another PC already I'm generally not interested in playing out a "who will they end up with" scenario.
This isn't to say that I'll only write Freddie crushing on or thirsting over characters he is able or guaranteed to end up in a relationship with - but I like to decide whether it will for sure be a dead-end/goes nowhere situation or if the character has the capacity to return those feelings/there is a possibility of things developing ahead of time so that everyone's on the same page. I think that CR can absolutely still organically develop and take unexpected turns, especially with events thrown in the mix, whilst still having a general idea of potential outcomes - though I like to plot and plan, I'm not into rigidly deciding every detail of how something will develop and forcing CR in the originally decided direction if it no longer makes sense, but usually with partners I like to think about likely vibes and then plot out how we can cultivate that, discuss whether or not we want to do things that would derail that trajectory, etc.
If you're not interested in playing off of him or having me tag out to any of your journals with him, just pop a word in the screened comments on this post and let me know. You don't have to give a reason and I won't question it or anything, just give me the journal names to avoid with him and I will steer clear!