Much like bards.Snuck up on me from out of nowhere, and now it seems to be somehow ubiquitous.
As a Californian, I think this is of a piece with the rest: "prancing" feels like a coded word to me, maybe not in British English...
I'd wager it's an emergent result of the accidental yet logical intersection of 3E Bard Spellcasting design with the general 3E Skill system: a power gaming 3E Bard is going to be a smooth operator.Sometimes I really hate what RPGs and pop culture have done to the bard.
It’s…not remotely a silly concept.
In my head, the archetypal Bard is Taliesin, but I'm a weirdo.The strangest thing for me is is the idea of the Bard as lothario (or coquette). Snuck up on me from out of nowhere, and now it seems to be somehow ubiquitous.
Yeah, same.
Hmm. In British English it's sort of more "annoying idiot"-coded than gay-coded, at least in my experience/vocab, but yeah California is rather different. Mincing would be gay-coded in the UK for sure.
Possibly it's because I am older than you, but I am familiar with homophobic implications of "prancing" in British English. The boarding school I attended in the 1980s was a massively homophobic environment, and I've been the victim of homophobic bulling myself. But I can't say I've ever considered bards gay-coded. It was probably the Asterix comics that formed my negative view of bards. That and a general aversion to music.
For many folks, sadly, they combine the two ideas into one. To make it sound really really bad.
Funny. In my head the typical bard is the Wife of Bath from the Canterbury Tales. She is awesome.
Wow, I'd never actually read Chaucer (yes, yes, I know), but I just read that, and that is actually a great tale and seems very long before its time (though I suspect that says more about our perceptions of the past than anything else).
