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[Saphiron123]

I know DA is getting very PC, but dragon age used to discuss the issues, they used to tackle them head on. DAI seems to have moved away from that, everything and everyone is cool. Bioware used to call out prejudice, let the player decide where he falls, elves were thrown in alienages (none of those in DAI) and a city elf warden took revenge on a noble who raped his friend, Dwarves cast out the surfacers, treat the castless as inhuman, Qunari felt they were the superior race and Sten couldn't understand that a female warden was both a woman and a warden. And humans destroyed the elves and made them slaves.

Here's Sten, on the subject of women fighters.



Sten wasn't trying to be jerk, he just didn't get it. His culture is radically different. His religion was different.

I enjoy the inclusiveness of DAI. I just hope bioware isn't shying away from prejudice, giving up on serious issues in favor of everyone magically getting along. 

Take Dorian, amazing character, great dialogue... but despite his talk about expectation to marry and all, the only character in the entire game who holds his lifestyle against him seems to be his father. Doesn't feel real... there's real challenge getting accepted for people in the gay community, things DAO and DA2 would comment on. And bull suggests the qunari who basically feel women are unfit to be warriors are totally accepting of all sexual preferences... the Qun, the hardest most formal religion in Thedas is suddenly liberal? In DA2 they were a terrifying warrior race who embraced spreading the Qun as the be all and end all of their existence. Through any means necessary (they also had awesome eyes and horns, now they're so... pretty.)

Inclusiveness is awesome, but a world without prejudice is a world without drama, and creating a magical world where everyone accepts and loves everyone else is a world that isn't real. Discuss prejudice, bioware, let there be conflict... don't whitewash it, and make racism and sexism magically a distant memory. Some of your best stories started with casteless dwarves and elves fighting injustice in the denerim alienage. I remember being treated like a messenger at Ostagar as an elf, while the blacksmith made fun of fetch quests to my human warden, saying he "had better things to do".

DAI didn't feel like it touched on those subjects at all. Sure everyone is included... but it's a missed opportunity for real storytelling.

[David Gaider]

The Qunari are very fond of categorization, and look upon those categories as absolute and defining -- but they are not without their own degree of fluidity by Qunari standards, which are very different from our own.

 

You say you're female? Then you do not fight -- "fighting" being when someone serves as a warrior. Some folks looked on Tallis as a contradiction to this as well, rather than accepting that someone like Sten would not look upon what she does as fighting. Being able to pick up a weapon and use it, even to use it well, does not make one a warrior if that is not their purpose (which it would not be, for a Ben-Hassrath, but certainly would be for a Grey Warden whose stated purpose is to combat the darkspawn).

 

You say you're male? Then fighting is acceptable. Even if your biology might say otherwise, the Qunari have a term for what this means and clearly the Tamassrans take it into account -- though you might note Iron Bull did not indicate how easily that might occur. We have a term for "transgender" in our real-world society as well -- that does not automatically translate into it being looked upon exactly the same by every person.

 

You can take what Sten said in DAO as the last and final word on every aspect of Qunari society, and thus everything following it as contradictory, or you can take into account these different viewpoints as new information and consider how they fit into the whole. It's really up to you, though that's hardly going to stop us from further developing the Qunari culture...regardless of the reasons one might ascribe to us for doing so.

[David Gaider]

I will also point out, since Dorian was mentioned, that Dorian's father did not have a problem with his homosexuality in and of itself.

 

His problem was that Dorian refused to do his duty as the heir of a proud Tevinter family. If Dorian had agreed to marry as intended, and kept his homosexuality as a private conceit, there would have been no conflict. The issue insofar as Tevinter society goes is not with homosexuality in and of itself, but with their insistence on a public standard for any and all members of the upper class -- no one does blood magic, no one is anything other than their perfect ideal, and the polite fiction must always be maintained. Appearances are everything, even if every single person understands that the truth behind closed doors is completely different.

 

tl;dr: It's not about Tevinter "suddenly being homophobic when the rest of Thedas isn't", it's about Tevinter society's preoccupation with appearances.

 

Take that as you will.

[David Gaider]

it seems like "choosing" to be a different gender is more extreme and would have been even less accepted, especially if the biological female was better at something else than she was at fighting (can she not become an aqun athlok in such a case? What if she wants to live as a man but doesn't want to be a soldier?). I definitely got the impression that personal desires didn't matter and "the will of the Qun" was everything. I mean Ketojan killed himself without question even though he didn't want to die because that's what the Qun required . Sten doesn't even seem to be able to comprehend that a biological female can fight. It would have been less confusing if he had assumed she was transgender. "oh you're an aqun athlok" rather than arguing in confused circles about how women can't fight. I hope this doesn't come across as aggressive or something weird, just trying to explain where my disconnect at least is coming from. (I don't know about others)

 

Be careful how you picture the process of becoming aqun-athlok. If you picture someone announcing it, and suddenly the Tamassrans fall all over themselves to abide by that person's wishes, that's not really in keeping with what we've established about Qunari society...and neither is it something Iron Bull implies when he explains the existence of the term. From what you've said, I think the hitch is probably your perception of it as a choice.

 

Insofar as the Grey Warden in DAO went, Sten wouldn't have made that assumption because the female Warden neither presented herself as male nor claimed to be one. Granted, he doesn't know everything about human society, but by the time he brings the subject up he's known the Warden long enough to realize she's female...which makes no sense to him.

 

Of course, it's also fair to say that aqun-athlok was not even a concept to us at that time, which is absolutely true. Even so, when the writers discussed the concept as a group, we realized it did not contradict anything we'd already established. It made sense to us, after all, that a society which established so much emphasis on gender might also have a more nuanced understanding of it, and that this didn't contradict all the other ways in which their society is extremely rigid.

[David Gaider]

You can't tell me the Qunari would ever think a biological female could ever be a male, which is what The Iron Bull claims to be the case. He doesn't say females can become warriors under the Qun, he says they become males in order to be warriors. That would completely contradict what Sten said in Origins, which is why I hand-wave this as The Iron Bull making stuff up for Krem's sake.

 

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the problem here is one of your own manufacturing.