Pathfinder Is Still Bad

[TOZ]

You are right, it is really stupid to judge rules by whether or not they create bad effects for games.

So you agree with me, you just disagree about what the bad thing is.

[Kaelik]

You are right, it is really stupid to judge rules by whether or not they create bad effects for games.

So you agree with me, you just disagree about what the bad thing is.

Uh... No. I agree with you about zero things. I was sarcastically mocking you for arguing that whether or not a rule produces bad results is irrelevant to whether or not it is a bad rule.

[TOZ]

Alright then.

[maglag]

Warforged suffer from the Western "Neutral gender equals male" ideology that plagues pretty much every constructed race in fiction. It's very common, and very annoying.

By convention, computers and robots are male, ships, cities, and countries are female.

If you build a giant robot the size of a city or a country, then things get confusing.

Well, more like, by convention, anything humanoid without tits is treated as male. Hence dragon tits, because people wouldn't know that female dragonborns weren't male without lumps of fat on their chest.

Nagas (full serpent body ones, just human head) are usually considered female despite lack of tits.

Dolls with dresses are also considered female even if they're flat-chested.

If you had a dragonborn with sleek body and a frilly skirt, I bet people would consider it female even without tits.

And then there's the reverse case of big ogres/demons with hanging bags of fat from their chests, which are usually seen as male.

[Prak]

Yes, there are ways that creatures can have an indicated sex beyond just tits.

But typically, when you show people something like this-


they assume the character is male-identitied. Put a skirt on that character, and I would expect you to be doing a camp effeminate character before I ever expected a serious exploration of gender identity, because that happens way more frequently.

When a transformer is supposed to be female, the designers feel compelled to give it robot tits-

Sometimes literally, sometimes only approximately.

And this is just the most visible example, not the only one. Your counter about ogres and demons with giant saggy pecs...



Those are not tits. An ogre or large demon that has realistic female anatomy is not generally going to be confused for male.

Edit: Also, Transformers Prime Starscream laughs at your suggestion that a slender dragonborn will be read as female-

[OgreBattle]

This is a male bear:


This is a female bear:

[Prak]

That is also a character from Eastern media, and their gender is explicitly stated, because readers would assume them to be male.

[maglag]

Last time I checked, momma bears who rend and tear anything that threatens their cubs have been a vaguely humanoid staple of European mythology since anyone cares to remember. Without tits. Goldylocks anyone? Is the typical mother bear ever represented with large boobs outside of parodies?

(also transformer's primse starscream doesn't count because it has manly wide shoulders, which is probably a bigger staple of masculinity than having an actual dick).

[Prak]

My point is that the "neutral=masculine" trope is primarily a western one. Also "Momma Bear" has a distaff counterpart known as "Poppa Wolf," so that characterization alone would not make readers realize the character is female.

Look, you had counterpoints that certainly fucking exist, but Western culture has a huge "neutral means male" problem, which is partially because Western culture primarily signifies femininity with tits.

And Starscream has wide shoulders because he's a fucking jet. He is otherwise the lithe bodied character you say that a female dragonborn could be to denote female-ness without tits. He even has fucking high heels.

[Starmaker]

Edit: Also, Transformers Prime Starscream laughs at your suggestion that a slender dragonborn will be read as female-

That's a girl in thigh-high boots and heels, and with long nails on her slender hands.

Dude. Chick. Chick. Dude.

A slender dragonborn, especially if there are also muscular and stocky dragonborn, would be almost certainly read as female.

[Prak]

Prime Starscream is very much not explicitly treated as a female character. No one even suggests it.

But I fucking SWEAR he was patterned off of The Monarch, who is very, very fucking coded as a camp border-line gay character.

[Starmaker]

Prime Starscream is very much not explicitly treated as a female character. No one even suggests it.

I'm not saying he's female. I'm saying (1) characters don't need tits to look feminine, and (2) a character who looks feminine but is actually male is not a counterexample. No one thinks "Starscream is a chick" because he's an established character voiced by a dude. But the static picture looks like a robot femme fatale.

Humanoid characters are rarely "neutral", even objects aren't fully neutral (#1 at the link, NSFW for truck nuts). The warforged you posted isn't "neutral-therefore-male" because of some weird cultural hangup, they are proportioned specifically like a human male. If you give a humanoid character the distinguishing visual characteristics of a human male, they'll be read male, no surprise. Now this one is neutral:

Here's a lizardman. Note the broad manly torso and nekkid pecs.

Here's a lizard girl. Note the slender body, the clothes covering her (flat) chest and the fluffy "hair".

Wait, no, the second one is a dude, too.

[Eikre]

I would like a race of bird people where the men are all excitable painted dandies and the ladies are gruff, frumpy slobs.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I would like a race of bird people where the men are all excitable painted dandies and the ladies are gruff, frumpy slobs.

I've done that. It was hilarious, the bird people didn't have much exposure to humanoids and assumed the rough, rugged humanoids were females and the delicate preening humanoids with the weird fat deposits on their chests to be male (clearly some sort of display like our males' throat pouches, although the fact they walk around with them inflated at all times is absolutely scandalous).

One of my players had a habit of attempting to seduce someone at every stop they had. (Outside of the Ranger's bedroom, you hear two people shouting "YOU'RE NOT A WOMAN!" in a shocked tone at the same time).


EDIT: Regarding the "gender neutral is male" thing, do you have any examples of it done correctly?

[Whipstitch]

It'd take a big adjustment for me to make such jokes work because I've always been big on ramming home the idea that historically speaking professional warriors are gigantic, preening assholes. The whole thing where shit gets super utilitarian applies mostly to conscripts.

I mean, just look at some of these dickheads!

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Clearly that is part of your magical realm and no one in real life would dress like that in battle.

[Prak]

Goddamnit, western society has a huge problem with "gender neutral is male." This isn't something you can deny. The fact that warforged are almost always treated as male, that transformers are almost all male-identified, are symptoms of this. You can quibble with my examples, but you cannot deny Western society's bias of treating masculinity as the standard and femininity as a deviation from that standard.

The fact that a female transformer is typically given the suggestion of tits and a lithe form, that warforged are considered male because they're sculpted male, that a lizard person is assumed male because it has pecs are all symptoms of this.

There is literally no reason that Bulkhead from Prime-

couldn't have been made a female character. Cybertronians pre-beast wars are fully mechanical, and any variance of gender would be purely personality. They have literally no use for genitals or breasts. And yet they are characterized according to standard gender coding.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I'm not trying to argue that you're wrong, I legitimately would like to see some examples of a gender neutral character that doesn't to default to male without a dick.

[Prak]

Yeah, that was more directed at the others. I'd like to see examples of gender neutral that don't default to male, too.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I won't stop loving dragonboobs though.

[MGuy]

Yeah, that was more directed at the others. I'd like to see examples of gender neutral that don't default to male, too.

When you say this do you mean make 'acting'? I believe there are stories about neutral AI like HAL who's just a disembodied voice and the Borg are a collective so you could consider it pretty neutral.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Doesn't a human body without sex hormones develop into a more-or-less female body, but without breasts? (Frank would probably know more)

[Koumei]

Doesn't a human body without sex hormones develop into a more-or-less female body, but without breasts? (Frank would probably know more)

The human body starts as female and then sometimes pokevolves into a male form during production. Now that doesn't mean too much, given we start as assholes and grow out from there*, but you could make a kind of pointless argument for the "default" state of humans being female.

The sample Warforged picture, as provided by Prak, has a kind of masculine jaw and, more to the point, what appears to be a codpiece nailed on. Or just a sort of bulging Y-front section. It really looks like it was added to contain the nuts and bolts, so to speak, and when you shove junk onto the pelvic region, of course people will call it a male.

*Well, some people do. Plenty of people remain that way for all eternity.

[Korwin]

Goddamnit, western society has a huge problem with "gender neutral is male."

Looking at the Bulkhead picture, are you saying non westerners are seeing an female form there?
Do you have examples of females in non western media who do look male?

Thinking about it, I think I'm missing your Point...

[name_here]

Do you have examples of females in non western media who do look male?

For linguistic reasons, people literally only found out Otto is a girl because the main villain's evil monologue mentioned that all the Numbers are female.

The dubbers have stated that they used masculine pronouns because "it" would be offensive.

But Prak's actual point is opposition to the gender binary that for some reason turned into complaining about how people assign binary genders when they do.