So andromeda initiative is all about girlpower?

Quake 3 Arena? 

Oh dear.

I generally consider them a whole different beast in which I don't have as much experience in playing them. The few that I have typically have you playing as a party of people of both male and female, though.



It's worth noting any statement such as the one I made there is going to have some exceptions =P

That's actually kind of true. Sometimes I have to remind my younger friends that by the standards of, say, 1964 or even 1982, this is a near-total political and cultural victory.

It's less that the Qunari want to avoid hurting people's feelings, and more that they can be strangely practical in a reality-defying sort of way. Only men can be warriors. If this person is a warrior, they are a man, all other factors be damned. I think it was Gaider that explained this in details, the Qunari can go to great lenghts to reject reality and substitute it with their own so long as it fits the letter of the Qun.

In the same way that Sten can come to consider a Mage Warden ''not a mage'' despite all evidence to the contrary, since them being both his friend and a mage doesn't mesh with the Qun. Since Sten cannot dismiss that they are a friend, he dismisses that they are a mage. You can call it shoved in if you like, I thought it was perfectly in continuity with how Qunari view the world.

Anyway, so what if the Initiative has many females in leadership positions? I thought the word on the street is that we weren't supposed to care what gender a person is. Or does that only apply when someone else complains that there are too many dudes in X story?

Why though? Apparently there is no difference between male and female brains.
www.newscientist.com/article/dn28582-scans-prove-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-male-or-female-brain/

Take biology out if it and you are left with environmental and cultural influences, with really important ones being parents. This is why my eldest daughter - who is 2 - plays with what she wants, whether it is a dolls house or the brio train set and the cars. She has a bit of an obsession with trains (and the underground) at the moment. She also likes her dinosaur pyjamas and her pink barbie car (she threw the doll in the bin). I aim to do the same with chloe as she grows up to, and the other half (degree in maths, hated the fact she wasn't allowed meccano as a child) fully agrees.

Nature or nurture? I'd say it is the latter, by a long way. Still, I bet this advert has a few on here starting to mash their keyboards:

Exactly. Looking back at the conversation where Sten questions a female warden shows this line of reasoning. Sten saw a warrior and was confused that the warrior was a woman: "I don't understand. You look like a woman...". His thinking is more like  "this is a warrior, so they must be a man"  rather than "this is a woman, so she is cannot be a warrior". 

But I do have to admit that the aqun-athlok concept is very iffy to me. How does the qun determine that someone is an aqun-athlok? I don't understand how a person can "come out" in a society where people are sent to camps for abandoning their roles. Or is it determined at a young age? If so, how? The aqun-athlok idea is really cool but it brought up a lot of yet unanswered questions. But we'll probably get some more info in DA4.

I don't think age is much of a problem. Gender identity manifests itself pretty early, most of the time. Three-year-olds woukd certainly be under the tamassrans' care, and they'd make the aqun-athlok call.

I would take a lot of what Sten tells us about the Qun in Dragon Age: Origins actually with a grain of salt. When I first played the game, I didn't actually get, that they weren't human. Despite his size, I just thought he was from a foreign land where they have weird religion.

I never played any of the Dragon Age 2 DLC, but isn't Tallis an elf convert? She's certainly not a maid or something like that.

Also, I'm not too sure anymore, but aren't Qunari raised by a nurse instead of their parents and these nurses have a big influence on where their role in the Qun is? I think, with how the Qun works they wouldn't waste a talented cook on the frontlines just because he's a boy or force a girl who's good at fighting to go serve as a merchant. As I understand it, the Qun works as a mix of brainwashing from an early age and having a lookout for natural preferences and talents. Else it wouldn't work, because too many people would be unhappy with their place in the Qun.

At least how I understand the Qun it makes no sense to take things like sexuality or gender in consideration when assigning a place for them within the Qun. The Qun doesn't care what your sex is, what you identify as or who you prefer to fuck as long as you do your assigned job and do it well.

I'm willing to bet that anyone who came into Mass Effect via the 360 and were introduced to Bioware through KOTOR had more experience with JRPGs than they did with the WRPGs that you just mentioned since they were exclusively PC outside of a few outliers, so female leads weren't common.

Entertainement being ''neutral and apolitical'' sounds not only boring as all hell to me, but impossible as soon as you tackle any story more complex than ''good guys punch bad guys in the face, the end''. Which is fine to have, but surely not all stories have to be so limited. Whenever you depict stuff such as war, economics, social tensions, or any other topic that comes up in real life, it's political. It happens that some topic garner more press around the gaming community than others, true, and Bioware likes to write about some of these topics. Why not? Video games aren't mindless entertainement, not always. I enjoy games like DOOM as much as anyone, yet being challenged in your views and seeing stuff you don't like in a game is very much fine by me too. For instance, I found Cerberus's xenophobic political positions abhorent myself, but I don't think it means they should have been removed or tossed to the wayside at all (I loathe Cerberus for different reasons).

I also cringed when The Witcher waved its anti-war, anti-religion message in my face at every single opportunity it got, but it was part of the setting so I accepted it. Not that I disagreed with the basic points, but they were even less subtle about it than Bioware ever was, yet few people said anything or found it ''too political'' simply because these issues aren't very contentious to the gaming public at large.

To say nothing of one of my favorite RPGs of all time, Fallout New Vegas, which is an incredibly political game at its core, tackling too many themes for me to list them all and clearly taking cues from recent history.

And you might not like the explanations given by Gaider, that's your prerogative, but that doesn't mean that the explanation is not valid. The Qunari make exceptions without, in their mind, making exceptions for some individuals. I cited Sten, you could say the same of Hawke being recognized as bas-alitan by the Arishok. He's still a filthy bas that needs to be re-educated for his own good, but he's a special one or something. Or how they forbid women from being soldiers, but being spies that happen to fight a lot (Tallis) is totes fine. The ability to ignore specific parts of the Qun when it suits them is a well-documented aspect of the Qunari even before Inquisition. I grant you that the writers could have exposed this aspect of their philosophy in greater details, but let's not act as if they pulled it out of their rear.

Also, why is it a political point in particular when females dominate leadership? When males dominate,  does it mean ''the writers think males are better''? When females do, it means ''the writers think females are better''? If it's a perfectly even split, does it then mean that ''the writers were going for a quota, so political''? When is it not ''political''?

I just think people are incredibly selective as to what they see as ''too political''. Oftentimes it seems all but undistinguishable from ''topics I don't happen to like''.

But it's your perception that it is politics. Was it politics when there were more men?