Traditional gender roles, like most traditional mores, have the advantage of being clear. (Or, at least, of seeming so from a distance.) If you suffer from the anxiety of unclear social protocol, a historical time of clarity may seem appealing. It's also worth noting the "I'd love to go back to the Middle Ages! Being a noble would be fun!" syndrome; I suspect few of those traditionalists are playing women whose husbands beat, abandon, or cheat on them, or men who can't feed their families.
I also think it's a mistake to conflate LARP and living history, for reasons aside from source material. Living history, in my experience, isn't roleplaying as we usually understand the term. It's much more performative than immersive, while roleplaying is usually the reverse. The point of living history is that people are curious what that time was like, and the most immediate way of finding out is to get a bunch of people to act it out. All that sock-knitting is prime people-watching time.
Then, of course, there's the issue of source material. I think fantasy, as a genre, plays to the strengths of roleplaying, which serves as a venue to transcend the real. This is one reason why there aren't a lot of pure historical LARPs, or pure historical RPGs (successful ones, anyway); historical accuracy says "thou shalt not" when roleplaying is all about "you can".
Which is why traditional gender roles tend to go down poorly in LARP, I think; most people implement them not as "I should" but as "you can't". Nobody troubles themselves about a woman playing a character who prefers taking care of others to taking command, or a man playing an assertive character who sacrifices himself protecting his loved ones; they get irked by someone telling all the women to leave the room so the men can share their male lore.
no subject
I also think it's a mistake to conflate LARP and living history, for reasons aside from source material. Living history, in my experience, isn't roleplaying as we usually understand the term. It's much more performative than immersive, while roleplaying is usually the reverse. The point of living history is that people are curious what that time was like, and the most immediate way of finding out is to get a bunch of people to act it out. All that sock-knitting is prime people-watching time.
Then, of course, there's the issue of source material. I think fantasy, as a genre, plays to the strengths of roleplaying, which serves as a venue to transcend the real. This is one reason why there aren't a lot of pure historical LARPs, or pure historical RPGs (successful ones, anyway); historical accuracy says "thou shalt not" when roleplaying is all about "you can".
Which is why traditional gender roles tend to go down poorly in LARP, I think; most people implement them not as "I should" but as "you can't". Nobody troubles themselves about a woman playing a character who prefers taking care of others to taking command, or a man playing an assertive character who sacrifices himself protecting his loved ones; they get irked by someone telling all the women to leave the room so the men can share their male lore.