Guild Wars 2

I understand why male and female charr wear the same armor, as their body types are basically equal and there’s little to no gender discrepancy in their society (outside of flame legion), but why do the Asura share armor between both sexes? They may have similar body structure, but their dialogue and the backstory shown during their reveal month show they put just as much emphasis on each other’s gender as any of the other races (Charr excluded). It doesn’t make sense to me why they would wear the same armor.
I mean, the obvious answer is that since their body structure is so similar, ArenaNet didn’t want to spend the time/resources to make alternative armor skins for female Asura. But I mean…that’s not so much of a reason as it is an excuse for laziness. There’s no benefit for the company to go back and update existing armor skins at this point in time (same reason they’ll never go back and fix the tail issue for Charr), but moving forward, I’d want to see new armors have separate skins to help define gender with Asura.

I’ve heard some people bring up that part of the reason the female Asura don’t get more feminine armor is because they resemble children and they didn’t want to appear to be sexualizing children (same reason their “underwear” is swimsuits). Seems at least somewhat plausible, maybe, especially given some of the female armor in the game. There’s also the fact that the lack of breasts means most female armor wouldn’t work on them anyway without heavy modification.

I mean, they could have modelled asura-only female armor, but… modelling a full array of armors for one gender of one race, which generally speaking makes up 1/10 of the possible playable characters in the game (and thats aside from the fact that some races are played more than others which makes it less than that as far as overall playerbase) is not the most effecient thing to do. You could maybe call it "lazy

I think it makes plenty of sense with the lore, though. While they may identify their genders more than Charr do and maybe even to the same extent humans would, that doesn’t nessicarily mean clothing would reflect that. With the whole society being focused on knowledge and practicality, it makes a certain degree of sense that they would focus more on functionality than appearence. And functionally-speaking its pointless to have different clothing for each gender, especially given the lack of physical differences between the two. Something like a dress would only serve to get in the way, and fancy ribbons or frills would only be hazards when working.

Besides, for Asura the main physical trait that determines attractiveness are the ears, which clothing (aside from hats) has little bearing on.

While your lore argument does make some sense, it’s sorta contradicted by the most widely known Asura armor, Zojja’s. Her armor actually does have fancy ribbons hanging off of the ear pieces, and despite the fact that males can buy her armor as the cultural T3, I would argue that it was made feminine in appearance in order to fit her character (That armor being the only one made specifically to go on a female). Asura are actually known to be rather eccentric (Look at Snaff and how he modeled his golems after Zojja) so it actually wouldn’t be that uncommon for an Asura to want to dress up in nicer/exotic attire. Also, the whole “society being focused around practicality” is thrown around a lot, and really isn’t true. If you look at the three Asuran colleges, only one of them (Statics) is really focused on finding practical applications for research and devices. The other two are focused on theory or experimentation, and both imply (or outright state) that their work doesn’t usually have practical use.

Another argument against the “frills get in the way” thing is that male light armour, sometimes at low level but usually at high level, is still kind of frilly. Or ruffled, if you will. The Feathered set is probably the most ruffled out of them, but still. Honestly even some of the cultural light armours look like they’re made to look cool over being practical. And since most Asura npcs as far as I can tell are spellcasters, they’re going to be wearing the less practical light armour. Or the variant npc town clothes.

Asuran and DAoC lore lurikeens are alike. Female lurikeens have big boobs and nice rears. Asura females should follow suit

Or, you know, Anet could keep some originality.