Allan has made it clear in the Krem thread that endless pronoun debate will not be allowed to keep derailing threads. Please keep this thread on track.
a.) Believe it or not not everyone reads every post made on this forum.
b.) What a load of wishy-washy nonsense. BioWare's pandering to SJWs has reached a new low now they're not even allowing the opposite opinion to be aired.
Krem's a guy? You mean she's changed down there? Blood magic?
well explicitly said in game that he would never allow a mage to alter his parts... finds it all too messy to deal with
a.) Believe it or not not everyone reads every post made on this forum.
b.) What a load of wishy-washy nonsense. BioWare's pandering to SJWs has reached a new low now they're not even allowing the opposite opinion to be aired.
Seems the opposite of "wishy-washy" to me. They've made their stance clear.
I think you missed the memo about sten being part of the military and thus serving the arishok, and iron bull and krem being part of the priesthood and serving the ariqun.
Qun military is always male.
Qunari preisthood, and by extension the Ben-Hassrath, can be either gender.
Simple solution, but if you don't agree, here's an alternative.
Iron Bull is just a lot more laxxed and moderate with the qun then Sten is, plain and simple. I mean, its kinda obvious he is playing loose with a lot of their tenants imo, and even the other ben-hassrath gat says so, saying the only reason he wasn't considered a traitor was his previous track record. Its not as if he couldn't bend the rules, or that we haven't seen qunari female warriors until now ala talis.
Warriors are male to the Qunari, hence Sten's confusion with characters who both fought and insisted on being female. Krem is a warrior, which makes him a male in the eyes of the Qun; his biological sex has nothing to do with it. People are not wasted under the Qun, and it makes more sense to assign them the gender associated wit their skills rather than force an individual into a profession they have no skill with in the name of gender norms.
More like the other way round. Why would males be assigned to be warriors if they weren't better at it?
who cares if its a retcon or not? not the first one in the DA universe to happen. and wont be the last.
It's certainly isn't, the whole look of the Qunari is a giant retcon. But people are denying it's a retcon when it obviously is.
Guest_simfamUP_*
Bull is not your typical Qunari and is very open minded about things that other Qunari aren't due to his time with the Chargers.
/end of discussion.
People think waaay to hard about stuff that is very simple.
There's a few things I've been trying to understand about this thread, anyone could please explain?
1- Was there ever a well established lore about the Qun? In my experience playing/reading majority of the information came from a character's point of view, and if there's something DA has been consistently telling us about those different POVs is, even when they're shared by entire groups like the dalish or the chantry, they don't necessarily reflect the truth. Why would the Qun be any different? Why does what Sten said in DAO has to be the entire definition of the Qun's teachings on a subject and not just his own perception or understanding of it?
2- Why would this particular bit of information, on how the Qun deals with transgender people, necessarily mean the entire culture is being "sanitized" by Bioware? Does this changes everything else about the Qun? How?
3- If it is really a modification, what is the big deal? They've said many times that it's a very hard task to keep up with the lore (I believe they've hired an editor just to deal with it) and since it is something completely made up by the writers, why can't they change it (as so many other franchises do)? Specially when it's done in a minor and (in the way I see it) respectful way to the players.
There's a few things I've been trying to understand about this thread, anyone could please explain?
1- Was there ever a well established lore about the Qun? In my experience playing/reading majority of the information came from a character's point of view, and if there's something DA has been consistently telling us about those different POVs is, even when they're shared by entire groups like the dalish or the chantry, they don't necessarily reflect the truth. Why would the Qun be any different? Why does what Sten said in DAO has to be the entire definition of the Qun's teachings on a subject and not just his own perception or understanding of it?
2- Why would this particular bit of information, on how the Qun deals with transgender people, necessarily mean the entire culture is being "sanitized" by Bioware? Does this changes everything else about the Qun? How?
3- If it is really a modification, what is the big deal? They've said many times that it's a very hard task to keep up with the lore (I believe they've hired an editor just to deal with it) and since it is something completely made up by the writers, why can't they change it (as so many other franchises do)? Specially when it's done in a minor and (in the way I see it) respectful way to the players.
1. Because sten said it with 100% certainty, confidence, and his actions also displayed that it he was correct. This was continued in DA2, where the majority of Qunari (not counting tal-vashoth) acted the same way he did, there by confirming this is who actual qunari, raised in a qunari society, typically act.
2. Sten questions why a woman is doing a man's job, basically and in his words. That you're aspiring to be something you are not, and likely never meant to be. Suddenly bull comes along and says they got a word for it, then betrays the Qunari in his companion mission when he'd rather not leave the chargers to die proving he doesn't have the mentality of all other qunari we've run into. Getting rid of the cut and dry attitude of the qunari mentality is sanitizing it because people will get offended when people say 'jobs are meant for these types of people'.
3. it was already established. if people gave batman superpowers and made it permanent cannon that it had to continue in every comic after, people would be in an uproar.
Sounds really daft, creating a lore and then can't keep up with it as excuse for inconsistencies.
I gave up long ago by being troubled by story/lore inconsistencies. Stand alone story would not exactly eliminate this problem but might reduce it.
Television gave long time ago up on consistency and gaming is prone to doing the same. Gamers are lucky if the story is gripping and intertaining add good gameplay in the mix and youre in heaven.
1. If they chose to retcon a vanishingly minor element of a philosophical system, there would be very little fault to find with such a decision. Sten's version of the Qun isn't going to fall apart on the question of Krem's completely hypothetical status.
2. Sten has said absolutely nothing canonical concerning the status of transgendered individuals under the Qun, so we can consider the "if" above to be fairly superfluous...
There's a scene where Bull questions Casandra being a fighter because she is a woman. Of course, he gets put on his ass for doing so...
Krem's situation isn't an inconsistency, because in their eyes Krem is not a woman.
This isn't difficult stuff.
This isn't difficult stuff.
To all of those that popped in here strictly to tell us we're wasting our time, and shouldn't bother.
Kindly ****** the hell off. I enjoy speculation and theorycrafting. The arguments on both sides have merit, and discussing them helps point out weaknesses in our views on Thedas' background.
There's no scene. It was just fangirls asking a question of Cullen's writer, and the writer giving them a rather unexpected answer.
He's not exactly better in DA2 either. People think his display at the end with Meredith was something special, but I think it's very possible he was just protecting his own skin. He went along with the annulment as long as he only had to fight mages that he could kill easily. When Meredith asked him to throw away his life fighting Hawke, that's when he suddenly develops a conscience. Yeah, nice try templar. I'm onto your cowardice.
But anyway, you can take Alrik's paperwork to him and discuss Alrik's "Tranquil Solution". If you bring it to Elthina, she makes it clear she vehemently opposed the idea. Cullen... he skirts around saying whether he supported it, but the conversation heavily implies that he did indeed support the idea. Or at the very least, he didn't see a big problem with it. He actually whined that mages who oppose tranquility "want no safeguards on them at all". I wanted to stab him right then and there.
The Cullen in Inquisition is a completely different person than the monster that we met in Origins and 2.
He defies Meredith during the assault on the Gallows, and offers to watch over mages that surrender themselves (there were at least two), swearing they weren't blood mages. Because that's the duty of a Templar. I'm not suggesting that he wasn't heavily biased. I'll never forget him saying "mages are not people." But it wasn't as much of a stretch to the person we meet in DAI as you suggest.
Its because of the lyrium. I'm not kidding, here. If you have him take lyrium again his personality swap is pretty damn telling, I'd say. That **** rots your brain.
Anyway, back to Qun. A lot of people assume third person omnipotence in the case of NPCs. That is, "since this NPCs was written by Bioware, Bioware must be using this NPC to tell us about Situation/Person/Religion 'X,' and therefore everything they say must actually be objectively true."
Bioware does a fairly good job of not using third person omnipotence. Sten has his perspective on the Qun. Its the perspective of a soldier, and one that has never been outside his comfort zone at that. Then we have Bull. The perspective of a...hm...intelligence agent, I suppose? The Ben-Hassrath perform a more varied set of roles than the members of the Antaam we've encountered so far, so its harder to peg them down. He needs a broader education than someone that is going to be a sten.
A sidenote: If we ever encounter the current Arishock, I'll bet real money he doesn't behave quite like the sten we knew. He's learned, grown, and been exalted for it. He might be a completed jerkwad, or be more lenient to the bas, who knows, but he'll have changed.
Sorry, I digress. Third person omnipotence, right. What I'm getting to here, is that saying that Bull or Sten must be wrong, or that Bioware must have retconned something (which is literally inaccurate, btw. Retcons are what happens when something that is objectively true before is changed, and was now never true to begin with. Blizzard did this in spades. Bioware hasn't, yet.) is assuming that one or the other of them is must be correct. They can both be correct, because they have different perspectives on their people, on the Qun, and on the bas. I'd like to say "and on Tal-Vashoth" but I don't recall being able to ask Sten about them. Can you?
Not seeing any retcon but hardly surprised that there would be people running around yelling it from the rooftops
1. Because sten said it with 100% certainty, confidence, and his actions also displayed that it he was correct. This was continued in DA2, where the majority of Qunari (not counting tal-vashoth) acted the same way he did, there by confirming this is who actual qunari, raised in a qunari society, typically act.
Its a typical example of how the Antaam act, and only of how one of the Antaam act. It is also established lore, in conversations with Talis, and in Codex entries, that Qunari do not all act like the Antaam, because they aren't Antaam, and it isn't their role to act like one of the Antaam.
2. Sten questions why a woman is doing a man's job, basically and in his words. That you're aspiring to be something you are not, and likely never meant to be. Suddenly bull comes along and says they got a word for it, then betrays the Qunari in his companion mission when he'd rather not leave the chargers to die proving he doesn't have the mentality of all other qunari we've run into. Getting rid of the cut and dry attitude of the qunari mentality is sanitizing it because people will get offended when people say 'jobs are meant for these types of people'.
Sanitizing? You're seriously telling me that a society that doesn't even blink when a person born as a woman is designated by the Tamassrans as actually a man, and will be placed in a man's role because they're a man in the eyes of the Qun, is sanitizing the Qun?
I take real exception that. Its idiotic. That isn't sanitizing and making the Qun easy to swallow. It makes it more alien, not less, because our society as a whole does not ever act like that. Also, setting aside the idea that the Qun may practice superior gender equality, they still give you no choice in what you may aspire to be, and the re-educators are free to use tactics that would be labeled torture by every non-Qunari in Thedas, to enforce those roles that are decided for them. Oh, and they freaking lobotomize you if they can't break your will.
"Sanitize." Give me a freaking break.
Sounds really daft, creating a lore and then can't keep up with it as excuse for inconsistencies.
I gave up long ago by being troubled by story/lore inconsistencies. Stand alone story would not exactly eliminate this problem but might reduce it.
Television gave long time ago up on consistency and gaming is prone to doing the same. Gamers are lucky if the story is gripping and intertaining add good gameplay in the mix and youre in heaven.
I'm not sure two takes on the Qun by two vastly different Qunari (or hell, between a Qunari and a Tal-Vashoth in all but name in fact) are inconsistencies. Dragon Age thrives on unreliable characters and stories. Sten not being the be-all and end-all of Qunari lore doesn't mean Bioware don't give a hoot about it.
Hell, when compared to stuff like The Elder Scrolls or Warcraft who switch up major parts of the lore each game/xpac (let's not even get into things like comic books), if Iron Bull's perspective on the Qun is a retcon, it's a minuscule one. The Qunari ideal being a society of uniform robots doesn't mean they actually are uniform robots, no society is.
Best way to defeat one's enemy is to know them
You really should consider switching over to the winning team btw!
Very true.
Oh and I am on the winning team! All that magic and you can't see how you are destined to fail and have no chance? Was losing the largest island in Thedas not a wake up call? Turn your arrogance into submission to the Qun and you may not only yet live, but also become a part of something far greater than you could achieve on your own.
Strengthen the Qun! Do not slap away my open hand.
Guest_EntropicAngel_*
I'll never forget him saying "mages are not people."
The problem I struggled with was that I thought once you had a role in the qun , that was that. Say there was a male qunari raised to be a warrior but started to pass later in life wouldn't the qun nip that in the bud? Since they already gave a role to such a person and any act of defiance would need to be "corrected" right? Did I misunderstand the qun?
I feel bioware did this because in order to have a qunari inquisitor, without changing just about every line of dialogue thy needed to make qunari have the ability to be 'normal'. Granted bull isn't very normal, until you compare him to sten, the tal Vasoth merchant in awakening or the qunari in da 2.
I feel that up until inquisition, all the qunari we'd seen up until that point were never suppose to be normal.
1. Sten is selected to undergo a semi-diplomatic military operation in a foreign country to study the blight. In the dream sequence of his, we see his companions and shock of all shocks, they act normal. They complain about things, they don't talk in that weird uptight way sten does, they even have senses of humor. But stens the leader, and so he's meant to be more responsible and devout then those below him.
2. Every qunari who we saw in DA2 was a member of the Arishoks personal army, which I'm going to go out on a limb and guess were picked for being especially good at what they do and espeically loyal to the qun. Those who weren't became the tal-vashoth we saw in the game, and they follow the qun as well telling them they need to act like raiding criminals because of their lack of faith. Maraas is a weirdo so there.
And regardless, besides talis up until inquisition, every qunari we saw was either part of the military, or a weirdly devout follower of the quns tenants of disbelievers. We never saw a normal follower of the qun like a bread baker, or farmer, or anyone like that.
So yeah, it was nice to have iron bull in this game to show that no, not every qunari is someone whose gone through strict military training since they were very young and yes, they are capable of having emotions beyond honor bound seriousness.
Its a typical example of how the Antaam act, and only of how one of the Antaam act. It is also established lore, in conversations with Talis, and in Codex entries, that Qunari do not all act like the Antaam, because they aren't Antaam, and it isn't their role to act like one of the Antaam.
Sanitizing? You're seriously telling me that a society that doesn't even blink when a person born as a woman is designated by the Tamassrans as actually a man, and will be placed in a man's role because they're a man in the eyes of the Qun, is sanitizing the Qun?
I take real exception that. Its idiotic. That isn't sanitizing and making the Qun easy to swallow. It makes it more alien, not less, because our society as a whole does not ever act like that. Also, setting aside the idea that the Qun may practice superior gender equality, they still give you no choice in what you may aspire to be, and the re-educators are free to use tactics that would be labeled torture by every non-Qunari in Thedas, to enforce those roles that are decided for them. Oh, and they freaking lobotomize you if they can't break your will.
"Sanitize." Give me a freaking break.
Ok, I actually dug into my freaking book collection just to find this hard bound comic, so stay with me here, also continuing what you mentioned. Rassan, a member of the Tamassran. She acted with the same mentality of Sten and the Arishok. That from the moment you are born, you are designated a purpose. You can not change this. Hell, part of her job is to literally brainwash people into this mentality with a magic poison ball called the qamek. Let's also add that Rassan, as a member of the Tamassran, is also part of the Ariqun, the same priesthood branch that the Ben-hassrath aka iron bull's sect works under, yet she still has the same mentality as sten and the original arishok.
2nd part, that's literally sanitizing it. Taking away the smudges that seem alien to people. These are a people that came from unmapped regions to the far north with freaking horns growing out of their heads. These people ARE aliens and their culture should reflect that. Hell, their aliens to themselves, being unaware of their own origins. I don't know what society you live in, but if anyone ever says that 'a woman/trans person can't do that' they're labeled as outdated hate mongers.
It totally amazes me that people have forgotten that he said that when there were a hundred abominations stalking the Circle Tower, and he was a few feet away from a door where people were being changed into abominations ("Maker...the screams").
Do people really not understand how much of an effect this would have on you? Distort your viewpoint?
...actually he says that in DA2 after you recuse Keran.
But you're correct that going through what he did would screw with absolutely everyone's mind. It would much far less sense if he walked out of Uldred's coup completely unscarred.
1. Sten is selected to undergo a semi-diplomatic military operation in a foreign country to study the blight. In the dream sequence of his, we see his companions and shock of all shocks, they act normal. They complain about things, they don't talk in that weird uptight way sten does, they even have senses of humor. But stens the leader, and so he's meant to be more responsible and devout then those below him.
Sten also says while in the fade that is not how is companions were. He knew they weren't them.
Ok, I actually dug into my freaking book collection just to find this hard bound comic, so stay with me here, also continuing what you mentioned. Rassan, a member of the Tamassran. She acted with the same mentality of Sten and the Arishok. That from the moment you are born, you are designated a purpose. You can not change this. Hell, part of her job is to literally brainwash people into this mentality with a magic poison ball called the qamek. Let's also add that Rassan, as a member of the Tamassran, is also part of the Ariqun, the same priesthood branch that the Ben-hassrath aka iron bull's sect works under, yet she still has the same mentality as sten and the original arishok.
2nd part, that's literally sanitizing it. Taking away the smudges that seem alien to people. These are a people that came from unmapped regions to the far north with freaking horns growing out of their heads. These people ARE aliens and their culture should reflect that. Hell, their aliens to themselves, being unaware of their own origins. I don't know what society you live in, but if anyone ever says that 'a woman/trans person can't do that' they're labeled as outdated hate mongers.
Oy.
At what point exactly did I state that the Qun does not dictate your purpose? Yoru example fails at every level, joejoe. Furthermore, the Qunari do not brainwash you with qamek. The qamek is the last resort option, where they lobotomize you and you spend the rest of your life a happy drooling idiot, performing simple menial tasks. That isn't brainwashing you into the role they assign you, its erasing your mind so you can't argue anymore, and then making what use they can of your shell.
None of which has anything to do with whether or not Sten and The Iron Bull contradict one another.
And your 2nd part fails to make any logical sense. I point out that the Qun handles things (in this case, transgenders) in a way that is alien to ours, which is to say that they don't have a problem with it, and have a word and role prepared for it already. Our society does not. We frequently revile these people, adn out them through hell if they won't conform to the established norm. The fact the Qun does not, and handles it almost dismissively (what's that? You were born a woman, but identify as a man? Well, then you're a man. Moving on to more important things, now!) is anything but sanitizing it, it makes it more controversial. Its a gutsy move on Bioware's part.
What exactly about this situation makes the Qun more sanitary? Less alien? I'll wait.
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