479 réponses à ce sujet

[Lumix19]

Seems to me there's still a wish expressed in switching gender. "I don't identify as the gender I was born as, so I wish to be/become the opposite gender." You can replace 'wish to be' with 'am' but it doesn't change anything. The merchant wishing to be a warrior could just as well say "I am a warrior" and pick up a sword, thumping his nose at the Qun. It still requires a switching of roles, based on personal identification and wants (not feeling right in the assigned role/gender).

Qunari kids don't play (Sten is unfamiliar with the concept) and instead get raised by priests (i.e. drilled into their Qun role) at a very young age. So roles will likely already have been assigned well before someone can express with certainty that they are not of the gender their body dictates.

I think it's important to remember how much information Tamassrans have on these children. They're aware of their family history and their job is to watch over these kids and educate them so 1) there's nothing to distract them and 2) they're likely trained in the Qunari equivalent of child psychology. They're probably aware of the children's feelings on gender even before the children themselves are.

[Shelled]

It seems like they want to make the Qunari appear more sympathetic propably for future titles which is incredibly stupid and inconstant with what had been established earlier.

Personally i think it makes them far less interesting aswell.

 

You can tell this in their design aswell.

In DA2 it seems like BioWare modeled the Qunari the way they imagined from the beginning.

They looked very alien and intimidating and in DAI that is all gone.

They have been drastically humanized in their appearance

 

-Their faces is the main offender.

 

-Their Claws are completely gone

-Their black sclera is also gone

 

Why?!?! BioWare stop ****** redesigning everything!Stick with what you had already established!

they just look like humans with horns in inquisition lol. The hair for them is astoundingly bad as well.

[daveliam]

they just look like humans with horns in inquisition lol. The hair for them is astoundingly bad as well.

 

To be fair, they looked like humans with(out) horns in DA: O, too.  Just like elves, it seems like they went back towards their original design from the first game.

 

That being said, it would be nice if they had included the option to create a DA2 looking qunari as well. 

 

And I totally agree about the limited customization options for them in this game.  Not great.  Still, I'm very happy that they have been added as a playable option.

[Draining Dragon]

If there was anything good about DA2, it was the Qunari. I really wish they'd kept their DA2 redesign and their fanaticism.

[tmp7704]

There is a reason to assume its the same when examples of the same dimorphism exist and there is no further explanation on the subject
 
that is some mighty fine logic, truly a wonder

Sigh, no. You keep ignoring that there's aspects which, by your own words, make no sense if the dimorphism was identical. Namely, if the women were indeed physically inferior, we wouldn't see them employed in the armies to the extent we do see them employed.

There's nothing mighty fine nor wonderful in the 'logic' which ignores that just to maintain a mere assumption.

[AlanC9]

It's almost like Steelcan is trying to maintain contradictory realities in his head or something. I'm not actually sure how he thinks Thedas works because he seems to go back and forth between posts.

[LarryDavid]

No, they don't. There are scientific terms of gender but gender isn't strictly speaking binary - that's why we use shorthands that represent our cultural human view. The most common definition of a "female" tends to do with reproductive allocation but even that isn't universal in nature. The idea of "male" and "female" is a decidedly human cultural invention and only exists as a category (in our opinion) because we impose it on nature. 

 

It's the same problem as that faces taxonomy generally. 

 

The fact that we divide humans based on what we consider to be a cluster of reproductive features instead of the shape of our feet is entirely a cultural artefact, though it does correspond to features of our environment and circumstances. 

 

In sexual dimorphic species, by definition, females are the ones with the large reproductive cells and males are the ones with the small reproductive cells. This is universal and is used for both animals and plants. Provided of course that each individual can produce only 1 type of gamete and that not all gametes have the same size. For all other species 'male' and 'female' are not defined and not used.

 

The reason why your feet analogy doesn't make sense is because in order to produce offspring you need a large and a small reproductive cell. Recognizing the gender of an other specimen is essential for your survival. If you are not able to distinguish if someone is a rival or a mate, it is not likely for your genes to survive very long.

 

A fundamental aspect of evolution theory as we know it, is that you want to minimize the amount of resources you spend on your offspring and maximize the the amount of resources your mate spends on your offspring. In all sexual dimorphic species we observe both genders having developed strategies just to do that.

Females having larger reproductive cells automatically results in a resource unbalance, making females more valuable. As a rule of thumb, this is why females select males and not the other way around. A female selects and a male takes whatever he can get (as a side-effect, in most species males are more beautiful than females). Due to this one-sided selection procedure, males and females experience different selection criteria and therefor partially evolve along different paths.

 

The behavior and appearance of sexual dimorphic species only makes sense when viewed in the light of different gender based selection criteria. The notion that 'male' and 'female' is something we impose on nature is beyond absurd. It is the importance of gender for the survival of sexual dimorphic species that has 'forced' us to have a concept of gender. There is and will never be a culture where people don't differentiate between people they can or can not have offspring with. So, until we have the technology to combine whoever we want to produce offspring (and do it in mass), gender will be a concept that is beyond culture.

[LarryDavid]

sexual dimorphism exists in Thedas in the same way it does in the real world

 

It does not. What sexual dimorphism implies in our world is entirely based on inheritance. Because the offspring of and elf and a human always is a human, inheritance in Thedas obviously works completely different

[In Exile]

Bioware wanted us to identify with the Qunari race (since we can play as them) so they humanized the Qunari. Personally I hate it, I liked them better when they were alien and foreboding.

At least they could have added an option for dark sclera in the CC.

I'm pretty sure this has a lot more to do with not being able to do custom facial animations; they likely needed to have a human like face for the facial animation software.

[In Exile]

In sexual dimorphic species, by definition, females are the ones with the large reproductive cells and males are the ones with the small reproductive cells. This is universal and is used for both animals and plants. Provided of course that each individual can produce only 1 type of gamete and that not all gametes have the same size. For all other species 'male' and 'female' are not defined and not used.

The reason why your feet analogy doesn't make sense is because in order to produce offspring you need a large and a small reproductive cell. Recognizing the gender of an other specimen is essential for your survival. If you are not able to distinguish if someone is a rival or a mate, it is not likely for your genes to survive very long.

A fundamental aspect of evolution theory as we know it, is that you want to minimize the amount of resources you spend on your offspring and maximize the the amount of resources your mate spends on your offspring. In all sexual dimorphic species we observe both genders having developed strategies just to do that.
Females having larger reproductive cells automatically results in a resource unbalance, making females more valuable. As a rule of thumb, this is why females select males and not the other way around. A female selects and a male takes whatever he can get (as a side-effect, in most species males are more beautiful than females). Due to this one-sided selection procedure, males and females experience different selection criteria and therefor partially evolve along different paths.

The behavior and appearance of sexual dimorphic species only makes sense when viewed in the light of different gender based selection criteria. The notion that 'male' and 'female' is something we impose on nature is beyond absurd. It is the importance of gender for the survival of sexual dimorphic species that has 'forced' us to have a concept of gender. There is and will never be a culture where people don't differentiate between people they can or can not have offspring with. So, until we have the technology to combine whoever we want to produce offspring (and do it in mass), gender will be a concept that is beyond culture.

Read Ian Haking. The fact that we have "defined" male and female to turn on gamete size is not necessarily some immutable reflection of absolute reality but a reflection of what we see as a logical taxonomy based on our governing theories of biology. This is no more an absolute truth about biologicy than phlogiston was an absolute truth about chemistry.

You're also mischaracterising evolution by speaking of it in purposive terms. Evolution is really a statistical phenomenon that captures the distribution of traits over time with the environment acting as the selection mechanism across generations. There's no will to it, and our assumption about what precisely is being selected is in part speculative; we rely on statistical groupings of features we deem to co-vary that we organise in logical ways based on our governing theories. All of this is the best possible knowledge that we can have about objective reality because there are fundamental limits to our ability to model it. The important thing to keep in mind is that our categories - while the best we can have - do not necessarily correspond to metaphysical objective truth.

The foot analogy is hyperbolic by design. It's not meant to be persuasive or descriptive of a real culture - it's mean to illustrate the method of reasoning and the problems underlying the metaphysical force of truth people seem to want to assign to our current conception of gender.

Again, it is like phlogiston chemistry. That was a phenomenal aspect of human insight that greatly advanced our knowledge of reality. But it was not metaphysically true.

When we start ascribing agency or metaphysical worth to these ideas behind their utility as scientific investigative tools or as our best guesses about reality we engage in a really serious category mistake.

[LaughingBanana]

Well, it's a game where apparently people wouldn't bat an eyelash to the fact that a Qunari, of all things, can led a highly religious paramilitary organization waving the Andraste name and banner.

 

 

[Dai Grepher]

You clearly can't parse the troll logic that Sten used, nor the hypocritical distinctions in the Qun. It's not about observable facts per se. It's this weirdly legalistic and ritualised formalism. The Qunari invent rationalizations around their culture and categories. This is where the distinction between "wish" and "are" comes in. It's not about what these terms mean - it's about what they mean within the Qun. 

 

Let's use the best example of Qunari troll logic - the Arishok saying he's lost "no Qunari" to the Tal-Vasoth. This is obviously  wrong on its face: he's lost people who were once loyal adherents to the Qun via attrition over the years. Yet because of his actually using the No True Scotsman fallacy, he can get away with saying he's lost no "Qunari" because, definitionally, a "Qunari" would never defect.  

 

It's the same with "wish" and "are" in terms of gender. A person who is deemed by the Qun to be one gender can't be another. But how exactly that deeming happens is unclear and is clearly not tied to biological gender. It's the same troll logic. This fiction is supported by the Qunari just saying that someone who is biologically female is and always was a male - but that's the same troll logic as how a defector to the Tal-Vasoth was "never" a Qunari. 

 

Regardless of what "wish" and "are" mean in Qunari, there is no getting around the fact that you "are" what you are told to be by the Tamassrans, and wishing to be or even being something else is not tolerated. My point is that a baker is told he can't be a warrior despite the fact that he could realistically train as one and become one. So if they won't make an exception for the male baker, why would they make one for the female? Now, you can say that the Qunari are self-contradicting, illogical, and wishy-washy on their absolutist belief structure, but then you'd just be turning the Qunari into a big joke. If that's the way it is, so be it, but I prefer The Sten's version over The Iron Bull's.
 

Also, this "within the Qun" thing. I have no reason to assume it means anything different. The Sten was a fluent speaker of the human tongue and it's logical that he translated the concepts perfectly when speaking about them. Those who can't speak the human tongue proficiently do not speak it at all.

 

Your Arishok example isn't the same as this case. He wasn't saying Qunari were not lost. He was saying that the the Qunari lost nothing by losing those specific Qunari to the Tal'Vashoth. Their society loses nothing when weakness abandons the Qun, rather it is the Tal'Vashoth who have lost themselves. The Arishok sees it as fraudulent followers being purged. Weakness leaving the body.

 

If it's not tied to physical traits then the Qun does not exalt truth as it claims. Rather it makes stuff up as it goes. And besides, if it isn't based on physiology then it can only be based on behavior, which is taught to children from birth. So would a Tamassran choose to teach a female to be a male? No.

 

Another thing, if The Iron Bull is such a believer in the Qun, then why is he okay with Cassandra being a warrior? She clearly does not think of herself as male like Krem does. So why does he never question it? In fact, he goes further and asks her to hit him with the stick (post-Adamant Fortress). Not saying he should command her not to fight, but he doesn't at least bring it up? Also, if you ask him about the Qun, he will say that people like Cullen and Cassandra would probably do well under it.

 

Yeah. I'm thinking The Iron Bull is not a credible source of information regarding the Qun.

[ThreeF]

 

Another thing, if The Iron Bull is such a believer in the Qun.

He is not and that's the reason he was chosen to be a spy.

 

When he mentions Cassandra and Cullen he is referring to the fact that both are the types to follow structure/orders, but on overall his assessment is flawed.

[Hanako Ikezawa]

He is not and that's the reason he was chosen to be a spy.

No, he was sent to be a spy because he was suffering essentially PTSD from his previous role. 

[ThreeF]

No, he was sent to be a spy because he was suffering essentially PTSD from his previous role. 

Same thing. Can you imagine someone like Sten spy or lie about his convictions? Bull developed certain qualities that made him perfect for the role, the brainwashers saw this and used it. He went to them because he begun to question the Qun, his whole quest is about to Qun or not to Qun.

[Dai Grepher]

Which is exactly my point. The Iron Bull is not a follower of the Qun. He merely survives under it. Therefore his comments about some females being accepted as warriors is probably a lie or at least false. I would believe The Sten over The Iron Bull because The Sten was devout.

[ThreeF]

Which is exactly my point. The Iron Bull is not a follower of the Qun. He merely survives under it. Therefore his comments about some females being accepted as warriors is probably a lie or at least false. I would believe The Sten over The Iron Bull because The Sten was devout.

To call it a lie or mistake is a bit of a stretch imo, he is questioning his believes, sure, but he is not delusional, he knows how things are and he has not reason to lie about this either.

[Dai Grepher]

His reason to lie was Krem. To make her feel better.

[daveliam]

Which is exactly my point. The Iron Bull is not a follower of the Qun. He merely survives under it. Therefore his comments about some females being accepted as warriors is probably a lie or at least false. I would believe The Sten over The Iron Bull because The Sten was devout.

 

I'm still not seeing how Sten contradicts the idea of Aqun-Athlok.  He is confused that the Warden looks like a woman, refers to herself as a woman, but still fights.  He views her as trying to change her nature:  i.e. a woman who wants to be a fighter.  If the female Warden looked like a man and referred to herself as a man (like Krem), he wouldn't be confused by her, right?  So I'm not sure what I'm missing.

[Hanako Ikezawa]

Which is exactly my point. The Iron Bull is not a follower of the Qun. He merely survives under it. Therefore his comments about some females being accepted as warriors is probably a lie or at least false. I would believe The Sten over The Iron Bull because The Sten was devout.

Unfortunately, we have Word of God saying that The Iron Bull is not lying or wrong, so have no choice but to accept the retcons "further developing the Qunari culture". 

[Dai Grepher]

@daveliam I have no issue with the term Aqun-Athlok. I'm sure the Qunari run into them all the time whenever they conquer a new region or town. They run into female warriors on occasion, sure. They call these women Aqun-Athlok because they are living like males, in Qunari belief.

 

The real question is what happens with these people who have this term applied to them. Are they allowed to go on living as the other gender, or are they re-educated?

 

The Sten says the later, The Iron Bull implies the former.

[Dai Grepher]

@Hanako I don't think Gaider confirmed that The Iron Bull was correct. Even if he did, I think everyone in the Dragon Age community has learned to take his word with a grain of salt after all the other lore contradictions he's made.

[daveliam]

@daveliam I have no issue with the term Aqun-Athlok. I'm sure the Qunari run into them all the time whenever they conquer a new region or town. They run into female warriors on occasion, sure. They call these women Aqun-Athlok because they are living like males, in Qunari belief.

 

The real question is what happens with these people who have this term applied to them. Are they allowed to go on living as the other gender, or are they re-educated?

 

The Sten says the later, The Iron Bull implies the former.

 

So, if I'm understanding your question, it's more about what the qunari would do if they conquered, say, Seheron?  Would they allow women warriors in Seheron to remain warriors, but just consider them males and Aqun-Athlok?  Or would they 're-educate' them and force them into female roles?

 

It's funny that Bull brings up what would happen to some of the companions if the Qunari were to conquer and he mentions reeducation, but not because of gender.  I specifically remember him bringing it up around Varric and Sera because of their attitudes.  I think he implied that Cassandra would do well under the Qun, which makes me think that he is implying that she would be allowed her current role, but I'm not sure.

 

Interesting question.

[ThreeF]

I don't think that they would accept females that think themselves as females as Aqun-Athlok or warriors . It basically boils down to this:

 

Sten: You are a warrior

Female Warden: Yes

Sten: but you are a woman

Female Warden: Yes

Sten: You are not a warrior, because warriors are male

 

vs

 

Sten: You are a warrior

Krem: Yes

Sten: but you are a woman

Female Warden: No, I'm male

Sten: Warriors are male, so you are warrior.

 

it sort of works like "oranges are fruits, apples are fruits, so oranges are apples"

 

Another thing I'm thinking is language barrier and the fact that some words don't translate well into another language or don't even exists in other language, so they are replaced  by similar words the words "male" and "female" could be such words.

[daveliam]

I don't think that they would accept females that think themselves as females as Aqun-Athlok or warriors . It basically boils down to this:

 

Sten: You are a warrior

Female Warden: Yes

Sten: but you are a woman

Female Warden: Yes

Sten: You are not a warrior, because warriors are male

 

vs

 

Sten: You are a warrior

Krem: Yes

Sten: but you are a woman

Female Warden: No, I'm male

Sten: Warriors are male, so you are warrior.

 

it sort of works like "oranges are fruits, apples are fruits, so oranges are apples"

 

Another thing I'm thinking is language barrier and the fact that some words don't translate well into another language or don't even exists in other language, so they are replaced  by similar words the words "male" and "female" could be such words.

 

Yeah, so that makes me wonder why Bull says that Cassandra would do okay under the Qun.  Unless he thinks that she'd be cool with being considered a man?  Or maybe he was just referring to her rigidity and orderly ways? 

 

I'm intrigued by this.