Guild Wars 2

Silicato.4603:

My reasons:

- I know her from a long time.
- She is a clear heroine
- She will reduce for 4 weeks the price in somthing that I use constantly.
- The fractal is not a key factor to me. A think that a fractal is a fractal, no the next 8th wonder. So I dont care which fractal comes.

Thats why I like her over Evon.

really? those are your reasons?!

I known her for a long time as well and find her to be annoying and incompetent. Basically she’s just a town guard that got promoted to looking after a festival and allows someone to die. In fact she stumbles along in everything she does and then barks orders at us.

To me she is clearly not the heroine, playing more of a support role to point us in the direction of the next part of the story. She’s Trahearne 2.0 and turns up after WE have done the dirty work.

Saving a few silver. that’s worth it. I want to finally open those BL Chests sitting in my bank. Worth more than a few silver.

Fractal. Gods or Golem. easy choice.

Shiren.9532:

For starters, you’re missing the point.

I’m not “missing” anything. You repeatedly try to deny other people’s gender identity, which is a terrible thing to do. You repeatedly insist that real-world gender-essentialist stereotypes must apply anywhere.

I’m not sure what other conclusions I could reach while you keep writing things like this:

I’m not waging war on strong or masculine females, I’m annoyed that it’s used as a crutch to make women appear strong

Implying that women cannot actually be strong, only pretend to be by aping men?

at the expense of portraying feminine characters as strong front liners

So women can actually be strong, but only if they’re “feminine”? I’m not being snarky but honest when I say that I’m not sure how that would work. Stereotypical “femininity” is (among other things) the polar opposite of strength competence, which are, after all, stereotypically “masculine” traits. Even characters who are characterized as some variation of “strong but also nurturing” (similar to the way you described Balsa) or “smart for a girl” show this divide, as if there was some kind of internal contradiction to these traits.

It’s like someone is writing their own fantasy world where women still give birth (something men can’t do – that’s one of the reasons ‘equal’ is in quotation marks) and in some cases still have the physical appearance of a model yet they don’t face the realities of this. This is epitomised by Eir and charr society, where women still give birth but neither raise their children so they can continue to being equal to men.

I really don’t get what you’re trying to say here. Face what realities? Most (not all) women are theoretically capable of giving birth, at least during a certain time frame in their lives. How does it follow that they must raise their kids (“conveniently” taking themselves out of the picture) while fathers apparently do not matter at all? Again, there is nothing a female parent can do that a male parent cannot, and mothers do not magically become the one and only childcare experts as soon as they pop a kid out.

Charr society is written is the only way it can make sense. They’re a military society in which the individual matters little. It’d be a colossal waste of resources to chain half the able-bodied population to home and hearth for the duration of their peak physical strength and usefulness. Instead, valuable soldiers and workers can procreate and then return to their duties — and their warbands, the end-all and be-all of charr social bonds! — ASAP while the cubs are passed into the hands of trained specialists so they too learn as early as possible what being a charr means: doing your duty.

Charr society is one of my favourite aspects of this setting despite the fact that I don’t usually care for militant types at all. It’s well though through and thus believable— unlike a culture that states “yeah, I guess women are equal” but still falls into gender essentialism.

Your mention of diversity is ironic because you are approaching GW2 from an outside in perspective, but in the world of Tyria, women quite often win the numbers game.

GW2 has a good balance of male versus female characters. You seem to focus almost exclusively on what you would rather not see: the (non-“feminine”) women. It reminds me a little of the people who, honestly and sincerely, asked if there were any straight sylvari, or outright complained about there being none, just because of a grand total of two (now three, kind of) known same-sex couples.

The true protagonist and by far the most important person in this game is a man. Two out of the three order mentors, with whom we spend a lot more time than with their superiors, are men. Six out of the eight (now temporarily seven) members of the Captain’s Council are men. As is their Commodore. As is Imperator Smodur. (I think the Blood Legion Imperator, Bangar Ruinbringer, is male too?) And the leader of Ebonhawke. And Knut Whitebear, the de facto leader of Hoelbrak (plus his two sons lead the Wolfborn). And the leader of the asuran Arcane Council. The Firstborn sylvari were five men and four women. Charr have an entire story arc about their father, and three out of the five original warband members are male. Both chief delegates hammering out the charr/human peace treaty, one of the most important events in current history, are men. Norn can have a male rival or a male drinking buddy (that arc and that character are among my favourite parts of the game’s story overall).

That’s off the top of my head, not counting antagonists, outright villains or people who die before the beginning of the game. Men hardly get a bum deal in this setting, Shiren. Not only that, they get a TREMENDOUSLY better deal than women do in just about any other game.

Split for length.

Shiren.9532:

Maybe it’s because I (along with the rest of the GW2 audience) live in a world where gender matters and where equality does not mean the same. Someone’s gender is a part of their identity and it’s a part of their experiences and it’s something that I find very compelling as an element to a story.

Yeah, gender matters. It matters when you’re given a long, contradictory, dehumanizing, impossible list of things you MUST do, or must NEVER do, to “avoid” sexual harassment and assault — putting all the responsibility and blame for those crimes on the prospective victim, even when that victim is still a child. It matters when you’re denied ownership of your own body. It matters when you’re left to die in agony rather than saved with a simple medical procedure, just because male-dominated religions think that carrying children is your sole, true, divinely mandated purpose, and that you are worth less than the non-viable embryo that is killing you. It matters when, against the law, you’re denied employment or promotion because you’re pregnant — or have people flipping the eff out over your decision NOT to have any children. It matters when your gender identity is constantly used to insult and belittle. It matters when your gender identity is denied because you don’t march in lockstep with a status quo in which you had no say. It matters when said “deviation” is regarded as another perfectly reasonable excuse to hurt and discriminate against you. It matters when people voting for a female character are sneered at and accused of being shallow and just choosing her because she’s “hot”, which clearly is the only reason anyone would ever care about a woman. And so on and so forth.

There’s far too much of that toxic BS in real life, I don’t want to have it forced on me in my entertainment too. And that includes “benevolent” prejudice like the whole “women are so much more sensitive and nurturing” spiel, or “gay men have a natural fashion sense” or “blacks are great at sports” or “Asians are hot and exotic”. In the end, all prejudice only benefits those who have the privilege of being able to define, and being in line with, the status quo.

If we can imagine worlds with gods and magic, puny humans fighting huge giants and dragons that could squish them like bugs, walking talking plants, people in full plate running, jumping, flipping and swimming around in ways that would make any real-world Olympic athlete green with envy, etc. etc., I’ll never understand what is so terrible about “allowing” women to fully embrace such escapist fantasties just as men do. When men do it, it’s business as usual and an awesome story about interesting characters. When we do it, we’re Mary Sues and men with boobs.

To me, writers who actually think gender quality through and build their settings accordingly are an incredible breath of fresh air because they are so rare. (So kudos to the writing team for that, despite my many issues with how the story is handled!) There’s no way we can ever agree on these issues, so I’ll end it here.

Thobek.1730:

I known her for a long time as well and find her to be annoying and incompetent. Basically she’s just a town guard that got promoted to looking after a festival and allows someone to die. In fact she stumbles along in everything she does and then barks orders at us.

To me she is clearly not the heroine, playing more of a support role to point us in the direction of the next part of the story. She’s Trahearne 2.0 and turns up after WE have done the dirty work.

To the first:

Please explain, in detail, how you would have gone about defending against an attack from an unknown and unprecedented vector, in a world that incorporates both magic and late 19th century technology, at a public event, without impinging on the dignities of the representatives and attendees, and without having any special reason to expect an attack then..

Once you’ve done so, present your plan as your application to the FBI or whatever organisation is in charge of domestic security in your country.

Things slip through, and what happened was a pretty much completely new form of attack – it would have been easier to predict 9/11.

To the second: So, is your only judgement on what someone is worth based on their ability to kill things?

What you’ve described is pretty much exactly what a good military officer does. Lead from the front when appropriate to do so, but there’s no shame in delegating someone else to complete a task while you’re doing something else. (And, in the case of Southsun at least, she was definitely running around doing stuff while we were fighting in events, but it seems a lot of players missed it while they were busy farming instigators.)

Why do some here seem to think its dumb to vote for someone just because they are the most attractive one?