I’ve been playing seriously in the SCA for eight years now, but I haven’t focused on persona and I use my mundane given name in SCA contexts. This started out as a default but at this point it’s a fairly intentional choice. Why do I make this choice?

Not as placeholder as it seems

My current first answer to the persona question is, I am Anne of Østgardr because I’m from New York. I am someone who’s moved cross country twice now in the last five years, to cities I knew nobody in when I made the decision to move. The SCA communities I’ve joined in these moves have kept continuity in my life in uncertain times, and have been a place where I’ve thrived thanks to my found family. And I personally feel, if someone joined your community from another place, there’s decent odds people would call them name from place they lived before. In the Known World, I come from the Crown Province of Østgardr.

But what pants does your persona wear? (or, costuming choices)

I currently tend to wear masculine clothes in the SCA as well as in mundane life. I am both nonbinary and transmasculine, and I personally believe that while anyone should be able to wear whatever clothes they want regardless of gender, it paves the path for others using the pronouns I want to be called by, and makes it a little bit easier on everyone, if there are more visual cues that I’m not a woman.

I love sewing but what I love about it is machine sewing long straight lines (sewing machine go brrr), and then I love being done and having something useful. As a result my garb is not laurel-polished and it’s not fitted closely to me. I seem to be getting away with handing off cuffs and necklines to Aífe to finish for me so far, even though the garments sometimes come out more experimental than had I done it myself. (I do know how to hand sew, I just don’t enjoy it)

As a result I wear a lot of machine-sewn Roman garb. I made some for Aífe but she doesn’t wear it often for sensory reasons so she is mostly wearing clothes from destash sales or the free piles at SCA events. We wear clothes that enable us to blend in enough to do the things we love – the clothes aren’t what we love about it. I don’t cover my glasses or my modern dyed and shaved hair, you can call it creative anachronism.

It’s about having fun

I understand that the SCA started as a garden party for western European influenced fantasy authors, who thought courts of honor were romantic. I actually don’t really read fantasy these days, it is just not to my preference right now. (I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary nonfiction actually! Queer history post-1950ish, business self-help books, social science books about technology, new and weird science fiction, and inclusive romance novels together comprise almost all of what I’ve read from 2023 to 2025.)

I do think it’s fun to think about the ways that history has shaped us today – that is a core part of the SCA experience which I enjoy. As such, I would describe my persona loosely as “late Roman”. My ancestors were at least 1/4 from southern Italy, and presumably at least some of them were descended from someone alive during the fall of Rome. I think there are a lot of ways that living in a time when long-lasting political institutions were starting to collapse is resonant to the world I live in now. I haven’t thought that much about it beyond that. Maybe someday I’ll be one of those Roman Empire Guys but there’s so much else I want to do that it hasn’t hit the top of the list yet. And honestly the whole “reject modernity embrace tradition” memetic thread is way too close to white supremacists for my liking (even as a joke) so being an expert in the Roman Empire may never be worth the effort for me.

It’s also worth noting that probably another at least 1/4 of my ancestors were eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. I know several people doing Jewish personas in the SCA for similar reasons. I have a complicated relationship with modern Judaism as someone who is from an interfaith family, and I don’t think I would find it fun to portray a Jewish persona, but I wish my friends doing so the best (and hope they give me some of their historically accurate food).

It’s about respecting cultures I’m not a part of

I recommend this read on portraying non-western SCA cultures: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRjy9TqwVaQ7fYl08PM0LXBaNhqA_r-BkSEDB0ksEo_PdQwx5OLGUDPfAnzX43k8KG3u0haAByu_RoG/pub?fbclid=IwY2xjawJzpppleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHttuV4QJt4OdQgPMMGrnClqdlkic406LY4YFcxyhP2KcXlEqPSqJz9l8oV6a_aem_gzzQfsVQLjbSm92PngRO_A

I currently choose not to portray a non-western SCA culture in the day to day, even though I enjoy Japanese crafts like kumihimo, and enjoyed the one Japanese outfit I’ve constructed and worn. I choose this because I feel the bar I want to set for respectful portrayal of a culture that isn’t my own is extremely high, and I don’t think I can meet it 100% of the time, and I personally feel it would be disrespectful of me to modern Japanese people who are in a minority culture in North America to get it wrong. In the SCA’s history, I feel that there is a pretty large legacy of disrespect to non-western cultures, and it’s a very white hobby, and I don’t personally want to contribute to any confusion about whether what I’m doing is authentic appreciation or disrespectful appropriation. You can’t know just by looking! Someone at a demo, particularly the demos I’ve been to in the NYC area, will not know that the garment I’m wearing is the proportions of a medieval kosode rather than of a modern kimono – they’ll see a white person wearing Asian-style clothing. They may not want to get close enough to ask me about it. They may wonder if this is a safe place for them. The burden here, I feel, lies on me to prove I’m not unsafe, and that won’t always be possible. So if I can’t get it right, I won’t do it.

Example 1: Book heraldry isn’t my thing, and I don’t think I can get it right – so even when I’m wearing Japanese clothes or braiding kumihimo, please call me Anne.

Example 2: I plan to wear Western SCA clothes to the public demos I attend, and save the Japanese outfit for SCA-private events where people already know me.

Other people are free to make thir own choices – appreciation can take many forms! I have been blown away by the care others have put into their choices, even when those choices wouldn’t have happened had they stayed in the framework I’ve laid out here. This is just a document describing what I am currently doing in the SCA, not a description of what everyone should be doing.