Not the point. We have more women as leading figures of the Inquisition, and I'm 100% fine with that. The difference is between a world where sexism exists but is overcome by, say, the protagonist in a meaningful way like in DAO's City Elf origin, and a world where it doesn't exist. I say that if you want to make a statement about these things, the former is plainly more interesting and impactful, while the latter raises nothing but the spectre of a world that is, in this particular aspect, utopian.
It also has less impact. I know the argument that by depicting things as ‘normal’ you can change ‘the norm’ inside people’s heads, but I have serious doubts it works that way. What I’ve noticed is that when a fictional society has norms that are basically identical to my own (Dutch, albeit at the centre-left end of the spectrum), it just doesn’t register as something remarkable by itself; it also loses much of the ‘Otherness’ that I seek in fantasy.
It’s not that I want misogyny, orgies and genital mutilation in a fantasy IP, but what I would like is stuff that is clearly
different, that helps make the fantasy game or novel an excursion into a ‘Otherwhen’ kind of place. To be honest, I find more of that in good historical novels featuring openly homosexual Spartan officers, transgender Scythian shamans, late medieval black Islamic scholars from Timbuktu or Aztec nobles in 15
th century Tenochtitlan than I find in most fantasy.
Regarding the fantastic elements: essentially human nature is a constant in all stories we are making, regardless of how fantastic things are in any other dimension. That's because we need to connect to the characters in the stories, and if they're too different from us we can't do that. Since individuals can express tolerance perfectly well, having tolerant characters in a story is perfectly ok. Whole populations being more or less free of intolerance, that's much harder to accept because we don't have that, if only for the reason that human nature is such that people are different and not uniform in almost anything beyond the basics of their biology.
Basically I agree with you, in the sense that humans have the same basic biology and drives. This is why so many historical societies, even if they are completely or largely isolated from each other, show such strong similarities in their political organisation, social structure and the stories they tell. The differences are important too, however, and there’s a risk that modern western views dictate a lot of the form and content of the stories we tell, meaning that some ‘universals’ aren’t really universals at all.
It does seem we a similar problem with DA. Basically, it’s that it doesn’t seem to respect what we consider universals (sometimes perhaps wrongly) in human behaviour or maybe worse, that it injects some highly specific modern western ideas and attitudes and acts as if these are ‘universals’.
To me, DA:I essentially completed the transition from DA:O, where there was still a (admittedly relatively weak) sense of another place and time, to DA:I, which was ‘liberal North America with swords underneath a thin layer of fantasy sauce’.
Fiction reflects something about ourselves and out world after all, and it isn't JUST a literal or simplistic reflection of issues that plague it, but also more subtle or abstract things - like the way we, as society (or groups) currently view the world and others and where our expectation for ourselves or others are located. And through fiction women are still told that they're either irrelevant or are there to fit limited roles, which includes that of an oppressed victim or at least someone dealing with prevalent sexism.
...fiction/art/culture doesn't just passively 'reflects' reality - it resonates and influences it. It's a 'positive feedback loop' kind of thing.
There’s a lot you can debate about the strength of that feedback loop. I tend to think it’s rather weak, and what there is, is probably very complex in nature. What you are arguing can be used in favour of a progressive, activist agenda for fiction, based on the idea that fiction can genuinely influence attitudes and behaviour . Using fiction to make the world a ‘better place’, so to speak. Alternatively, it can be also be used to do the same thing for ideas that are repulsive to a modern liberal-progressive person, which I suspect pretty much describes us both.
Some writers, cinematographers, songwriters (as well as some of their customers) etc. seem rather fond of the idea of them having a tremendous influence, but that kind of figures…
Generally, I observe that I would have no problem with a world where sexism doesn't exist if it were the world of a science fiction story rather than a fantasy one. On one level, this reflects my opinion that tolerance is something that can't be achieved without a fight against our "lesser" natures, and that fictional worlds where sexism is not an issue should have such a fight in their history, and since science fiction usually takes place in the future, we can imply that such a fight - which, in the real present, is going on - has happened. On another one, it may have something to do with genre conventions.
Genre conventions associate fantasy with the past. Some fantasy is essentially timeless, and it would probably not be a problem there, but Thedas associates itself with the past of our dominant culture, very firmly, though religion, technology and social structure. So the relevant question is actually not "can a fictional world without sexism be believable " - of course it can - but rather "Can a fictional world that is otherwise so much like our own late medieval and early modern period be believable without sexism or with a successful fight against it in its history". One thing people who argued against me have overlooked is this: I am not asking for a world with sexism. I am asking "If this world has no sexism, how the heck did it get there"? Because I maintain that, given its prevalence in human history, human nature is like that that we can't get there without a fight. Maybe Andraste and the Chantry is part of the answer, but it's not enough for me. To me, DAI's way of making this explicitly a non-issue still feels artificial. I don't discount the possibility that this feeling is rooted in something only tangentially related, or in the way it was made a non-issue rather than the fact that it was, but if so, I haven't been able to pinpoint it.
I’d go even a little stronger than that. Fantasy is at heart ‘historicising’ (but not historical) escapist fiction. There are some mixed forms that deliberately inject modern concerns – DA is clearly one of those, reaching its peak in DA:I in some ways – and there are some variants that have some depth in terms of dealing with universal human concerns or interweaving language, history, mythology etc. Modern political and social issues, however, are usually the domain of SF or some mixed SF/Fantasy hybrids.
Anyway, because it is ‘historicising’, a lot of fantasy depends on recognisability (rather than authenticity) and the use of tropes, clichés etc., in a way similar to purely escapist historical fiction.
To put it in a nutshell, DA:O’s use of vaguely but not really very authentic styles of arms, armour, clothing and architecture is very much in the tradition of badly researched (if at all) and implemented fantasy and historical fiction. However, it IS instantly recognisable as ‘medieval-ish’. So are the basic social and political structures. The way Elves are treated can be easily seen as a variant of the treatment of Jews in 12th century England in say, Ivanhoe.
Recognisability based on the established tropes and clichés is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it makes the fantasy instantly accessible. On the other hand, it creates expectations based on popular perceptions of the genre or the inspirational material in question. Demolishing these expectations based on the source material (or comparable stuff from other ancient, medieval or early modern societies) can and will be accepted provided it’s done in a way that the audience can ‘logically follow’, but that is a bit of an uphill struggle. Most people have genuine difficulty with this because ‘the past is another country’. Having a fantasy society that is very different from what we know or think we know and mentally adjust to it takes a bit of time and effort. Too much for most fantasy games and most fantasy fiction, who are mostly eager to get on with killing things and looting their stuff or fighting supernatural threat X while bonking hot elf mage dude/dudette #1,728.
One way of describing DA and its world as it is now is that it’s a combination of escapist comfort food with a modest amount of modern social and political concerns injected in the manner of SF. I think you can see this clearly in the way the Qunari are depicted, who resemble a Star Trek-ish alien race typified by some minor physiological differences (horns and big size) and a relatively simple but suspiciously modern-looking, basically homogeneous culture, ideology and socio-political structure.
They neither resemble a genuinely culturally alien past or present human culture, nor do they feel, look and sound genuinely ‘alien’ as in ‘not human at all’.
DA basically poses a question of "What if the major religious figure - the Messiah of Thedas - was a woman??" - and so, it assumes that it would positively influence their position in society. And I'm not really sure how this can be viewed as artificial. Andraste isn't like Mary in Catholic Church, meant to teach women the virtue of faithfulness, motherly love and obedience - she's a charismatic warrior, a leader and Chantry to this day is pretty much a matriarchal structure. It teaches people that females are more suited for leadership position as they're not prone to anger or passion as men, which deeeeeefinitely influences the way people perceive gender roles.
There’s very little evidence (I might even say none whatsoever) that the presence of female deities and major religious figures determine or even influence in a major way basic gender attitudes.
The thing is – deities and religious figures are
not examples that are to be followed, but entities whose positions have to be respected and whose commands (including moral dictates) have to be followed / needs have to be satisfied. Greek goddesses weren’t exactly wussies, but this did not change the fact that compared to their Spartan, Roman or Etruscan fellow women, many Greek females had a, relatively speaking, highly unequal status. And our main source material for this comes from Athens, the very city named after a Goddess of war and wisdom, and where Her cult was pretty much supreme.
Well yes, but as I said - some things are human constants, and if some fictional world doesn't have those, that needs an explanation.
My main observation in this regard is that DAI's Thedas feels artificially tame compared to DAO. It lacks a certain grit, lacks certain edges, and everything that may affect the player in any way is designed to be as socially acceptable as possible. They even gave black-skinned characters African features - which they didn't have in the earlier games. The resulting impression is that social issues have dominated world (re-)design to the detriment of its already-established identity. They may have felt it's a price they can pay in order to be more inclusive, but I feel disconnected whenever my attention is brought to these things. Personally, I'd rather be forced to play a gender or a sexual orientation I don't identify with (since romance is a small optional feature), rather than having this world discontinuity. It's a Bioware thing, too. Every time they make a new game in an ongoing series, they seem to forget, or retcon, or rewrite, significant parts of their world. The needs of the day dominate over any long-term vision. [font=arial]I really hate that.
I have this problem too, though perhaps a little less. But the reason for this isn’t a positive one: I basically gave up on the setting itself with Dragon Age II. Up to and until Awakening, I considered DA generic but not bad mainstream fantasy with some minor BioWare-style inverted tropes as a distinguishing characteristic. However, it still felt like a standard fantasy IP that could evolve into something more elaborate, believable and interesting. It did not.
We even have examples of it on Earth. While - overall, through rather long period of time - women had to endure harsh treatment there WERE civilizations on Earth after all that treated women more fairly - not equal maybe, but much better than on other parts of the world. I have to check it more thoroughly, but If I am not mistaken, the Scandinavian women usually held quite a lot of power. Egyptian women did as well, at least in certain periods (and so did dark-skinned people of Nubian descent). So did women in ancient Minoan civilization (one of my favs, a highly probable inspiration for creating myth of Atlantis by Plato, lost to us because of humongous volcanic eruption that sent 100 ft tsunami towards Crete and swallowed a large chunk of island as well as Minoan trading fleet, which was its main strenght).
These examples don’t really hold up well under scrutiny. Basically, all complex agricultural and pastoral nomadic societies have a certain ‘bandwidth’ when it comes to male and female roles (or alternatives to these). Some lucky and / or gifted individuals can move outside this bandwidth, but they are not typical and pretty rare.
You never, ever find societies where all rulers are female – but you can find some that – barely – tolerate the occasional female ruler. You can find some societies where a few women can become warriors or adopt aspects of the warrior role, but these are either exceptions or a distinct minority. De facto bisexual behaviour (in particular male bisexual behaviour) is accepted in some societies or social groups within those societies, but almost invariably combined with accepting the needs of the family or dynasty.
The examples you name? There are virtually no known Viking-era Scandinavian female rulers, though women could be quite influential as wives, daughters, sisters and mothers. They did have considerable authority within the household, but that’s a feature of many societies, particularly ones where the men are away for long periods of time fishing, trading, raiding or warring.
The existence of female Viking warriors (shieldmaidens) is debatable, though various literary / historical references and some archeological evidence (both from Scandinavia and other Germanic regions) suggest there
may have been a noticeable minority of female fighters.
Shift the perspective to a female thrall or female captive (not even necessarily ‘foreign’ but from another region or closely related people) and boy, did she experience her relatively high status as a female first-hand. Same with the men, of course.
Same with Egypt. Women could be influential, and during some periods (Old Kingdom) a number of respected positions were open to women. However, all Pharaohs were male, with the exception of Hatshepsut, the earlier Nitocris is thought to have been male actually, while Cleopatra really belongs to the Greek cultural milieu.
So were all the Viziers, all the nomarchs and all the generals. The ‘ceiling’ for aristocratic women (especially if they were connected to the Pharaoh as wives or daughters) was relatively high, but nowhere near what is possible in the industrialised modern world. Arguably, what mattered was not that they were female, but that they were well-connected aristocrats who were given suitable posts that were female-specific or at least not male-specific, within a hierarchy that was dominated by their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and male cousins.
I’m not even going to seriously discuss the Minoans. We have no reliable information whatsoever except for what we have thanks to archaeology.
None. The relative prominence given to female figures in Minoan iconography is hardly a reliable indicator that Minoan women enjoyed a dominant or even prominent social or political status. Again, see the city of the goddess of war and wisdom called Athena. The main reason Minoan Crete is often used as an example of a possible matriarchy is because of obsolete theories by some dead, predominantly male scholars, which was picked up by later feminists (including the occasional female archaeologist, like Marija Gimbutas).
By the way, I’m not against fantasy being gender-equal and non-heteronormative. I can even like that kind of fantasy provided it feels believable to me when it comes to the ‘mundane’ (non-magical) aspects. Some of my favourite fictional worlds are decidedly non-white and non-heteronormative. However, what they share is a distinctive ‘Otherness’ and they don’t overtly clash with what we know (or think we know) of human nature.
Retour en haut
