Now that the Qunari have been thoroughly butchered, I wanted to compile my thoughts on gender under the Qun into a more comprehensive 'essay.' This is not primarily an essay about politics, identity, or even gender in the contemporary Western sense. It is an essay about language.
More specifically, it is about what happens when we attempt to understand a foreign culture through English.
Whenever discussions surrounding the Qun arise in online spaces, one phrase inevitably dominates the conversation:
"Under the Qun, your gender is your role."
Most players interpret this quite literally. If someone is a warrior, then they are a man. If someone fulfills another social function that's conventionally feminine, then they are considered a woman. The conclusion appears straightforward, and I suspect it is also the interpretation the writers themselves ultimately settled on.
I intend to dismantle it for my own amusement.
Not because I believe the games secretly intended something else, nor because I think this interpretation is objectively incorrect, but because I approached the Qunlat from a linguistic background fundamentally different from that of English. My first instinct was not to ask, "What does the Qun believe about men and women?" My first instinct was to ask, "What does the Qun mean by gender?"
This analysis is my attempt to explain why.
My native language lacks gendered pronouns. There is no equivalent distinction between "he" and "she." At first glance, this seems like a language where gender is largely irrelevant.
Counterintuitively, that is very much untrue.
The absence of gendered pronouns does not eliminate gender from a language. Instead, it changes where gender lives.
II. Where Language Stores Gender
English speakers constantly encode gender in ordinary conversation without consciously thinking about it.
"I saw her yesterday."
"He said he would arrive tomorrow."
Before these sentences can even be spoken, the speaker must already know which pronoun to choose. Gender becomes one of the first pieces of information retrieved when referring to another person.
This process is so automatic that most native English speakers never notice it.
Turkish works differently.
The sentence Çöpü attığını gördüm simply means:
"I saw them take out the trash."
The sentence contains no information whatsoever regarding whether the person observed was male or female. In fact, depending on context, the subject can even remain ambiguous between 2. and 3. person singular. The information simply is not grammatically required. It is not exposed unless it's required.
It does not mean Turkish speakers are incapable of perceiving gender. It means the language does not force speakers to encode that information every time another person is mentioned whereas English requires it.
Now consider Czech.
Viděl jsem ji vynášet odpadky.
Before we even reach the object of the sentence, the grammar has already revealed something about the speaker themselves. The viděl tells us that the person speaking is male.
Spanish encodes something else.
La vi sacar la basura.
The pronoun identifies the observed person as feminine while la basura independently marks the noun "trash" as grammatically feminine.
None of these languages have more or less genders than the other for both the object and the subject. They simply distribute gender differently.
Some require information about the subject.
Some require information about the speaker.
Some require information about inanimate objects.
Some require almost none at all.
Every language obliges its speakers to express certain kinds of information. English demands tense where Mandarin often relies on context. Japanese frequently encodes social hierarchy where English does not. Czech marks grammatical case in places where English instead relies on word order.
These are not merely quirks of vocabulary, they shape what information speakers must continually keep available while communicating.
Linguists sometimes refer to this as obligatory grammatical information. A language does not necessarily determine what its speakers are capable of thinking, but it certainly determines what they must routinely express. That creates a substantial distinction.
Popular discussions often invoke the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, the idea that language determines thought, as though speakers of different languages possess fundamentally different thought patterns. Most modern linguists reject that for various reasons.
Language does not provably constrict thought. It can, however, influence it by making some distinctions obligatory while allowing others to remain optional.
An English speaker cannot naturally produce the sentence "I saw..." without deciding whether to continue with him, her or them. A Turkish speaker can. That information is stored in the previous context so they fundamentally ask different questions.
III. Gender as Grammar
This brings us to grammatical gender.
One of the most common misconceptions among speakers of languages that lack variety of grammatical genders is the assumption that grammatical gender must somehow reflect biological sex.
It rarely does.
A French speaker does not believe a baguette is female. A German speaker does not think a girl is literally neuter because das mädchen happens to use neuter grammar.
The grammatical category exists independently of biology. Its purpose is structural. Gender in language determines how words behave, which articles accompany them, which adjectives agree with them, which suffixes they receive, how they are declined (or not)...
Gender, in other words, is less about describing reality than organizing it.
A noun belongs to a category because the language requires it to belong somewhere to function.
Native speakers rarely question why a chair is feminine or why a bridge is masculine. The categories simply serve as a part of the language's internal logic. Trying to explain grammatical gender to someone whose native language lacks it often produces the infamous question;
"But why is the chair female?"
The answer, of course, is that it isn't.
The chair is not female.
The word belongs to a grammatical category that English simply lacks (i.e. Masculine inanimate as a grammatical gender carries more information about the state of the object than its 'sex'). The confusion arises because learners instinctively attempt to translate one conceptual framework into another. What if, I began to wonder while playing DAO, the same thing was happening with Qunlat?
What if "man" and "woman" were not 1=1 translations?
What if they were approximations?
What if the game's medium of English language was doing the only thing it could do; mapping an alien system of classification onto the nearest concepts available?
Whether that was the writers' intention is beside the point. I think the possibility itself warrants exploration. Because if the Qun's concept of gender functions less like biological identity and more like grammatical classification, then many conversations throughout the series become open to entirely different interpretations.
This is going to be a long read.
IV. The Qun as a System of Classification
The crucial question is not whether Qunari have gender. They clearly do. The more interesting question is what kind of category gender is within Qunlat.
Most discussions assume that Qunari gender categories are equivalent to human concepts of male and female. The games often encourage this reading, especially in the last installment, but the broader structure of the Qun suggests something else.
The most important thing to understand about the Qun is that it is not primarily a moral philosophy. It is a taxonomy.
Everything under the Qun has a place.
Every person has a function.
Soldiers belong to the Antaam. Spies belong to the Ben-Hassrath. Priests belong to the priesthood. Artisans belong to their craft. The Qun is obsessed not with individual self-expression but with correct classification. A person's value comes from occupying the role for which they are best suited.
Once viewed through this lens, the statement "your gender is your role" begins to sound less like a claim about masculinity and femininity and more like a claim about grammar.
The moral legitimacy of the Qun rests on the belief that disorder arises when things occupy the wrong category. A baker pretending to be a soldier is not merely inefficient; they are violating the proper order of society.
This resembles grammar more than it resembles bioessentialism.
Grammar does not ask what a noun “really is.”
It asks how that noun behaves within the system.
Likewise, the Qun appears less concerned with what a person “is” in some metaphysical sense than with how that person functions within the social order.
Under this framework, gender ceases to be primarily anatomical, it turns into a designation of social behavior and purpose.
That is a subtle but enormous shift.
An English speaker hears “warriors are men” and naturally interprets it to mean “people with dicks are warriors.”
But a Qunari speaker might mean something closer to “the social category associated with warfare is translated into Common as ‘man’ because the people who express warrior-like qualities (aka masculinity) in South are referred to as man.”
The distinction sounds small until one realizes that the second statement does not actually define the category by anatomy at all.
Imagine a language with six grammatical genders:
warrior
priest
artisan
teacher
merchant
caretaker
These categories would not describe anatomy. They would describe function.
A person assigned to the "warrior" category would receive the grammatical markers associated with warriors. A person assigned to the "teacher" category would receive its respective markers. Native speakers would not experience this as strange any more than an Italian speaker experiences the gender of a noun as strange. The category would simply be part of the language.
This is the conceptual leap that I believe many players never make, because English encourages us to treat gender as an identity rooted in gender expression. The Qun may instead be treating gender as a functional classification.
V. Rereading Sten
This is why Sten’s infamous line in Origins has always fascinated me.
"You look like a woman. But you are a soldier. One of those things can't be true."
For many players, the line immediately establishes Sten as sexist. The implication seems obvious: women should not fight. That is certainly a possible reading.
But it is not the only one.
Imagine a speaker whose native language organises people according to functional categories rather than biological sex. Now imagine that speaker trying to communicate through a language that lacks those categories and instead forces every distinction into “man” and “woman.”
Suddenly the sentence becomes less straightforward.
To illustrate the difference, imagine someone saying:
"I am a tailor."
"Then why are you commanding an army?"
Under a linguistic (and cultural) reading of the Qun, Sten’s question can be understood similarly.
Notice he starts with "I don't understand. You look like a woman."
This can be a context-seeking question if we go with the assumption that he's not being condescending. He remarks that the Warden looks like someone that should not swing a sword. They are not conforming to the self expression of a sword-swinging role.
"You are a Grey Warden, so it follows that you can't be a woman."
He has not denied the player their role due to their sex, he has denied them their sex due to their role. The role takes precedence. The role is not in dispute. The wording is precise and it is fundamentally very revealing. It doesn't mean a person's sex is an assignment like a profession, it means a person's profession is as predetermined as their sex.
“You identify with category A. Why are you performing the function and expressing the characteristics associated with category B?”
The confusion is categorical. In this sense, it emphasises Qun's strict adherence to roles. Why appear as something you're not? Why express yourself like a priest and fight like a sten? What are you?
The face value interpretation is of course that his assumption that someone can't simultaneously express femininity and also adopt a masculine role is an indicator of how conservative Qun is.
Now contrast this with areal-life experience I've had learning Czech.
In Czech, grammatical gender is not optional, and it cannot easily be avoided without making language itself unnatural or incomplete. Over time, I found myself running into a recurring issue: speakers struggled to consistently apply feminine forms to my name as its phonetic structure was perceived as categorically "masculine-sounding" within their system.
Rather than assigning a gendered grammatical form, people would restructure sentences in ways that bypassed agreement entirely. The result is something comparable to constantly replacing a possessive structure like "Clair’s computer" with the clumsy "computer belonging to Clair" or even "Clair computer" in certain odd cases. It is noticeably strained in everyday use.
At various points, I explicitly stated that I didn't mind being referred to with masculine forms. From my perspective, this was a simple matter of grammatical convenience rather than identity. Yet many speakers still refused to make the shift. This was not a rejection of my gender identity, had I came out as a man I know that these people would have obliged. They thought of it as insulting to me, that I simply lack the lingual framework to understand the distinction. And to a certain degree they are right. As a non-native speaker, I will never experience grammatical gender in the same intuitive, automatic way that native speakers do. I won't feel like I'm being denied femininity simply because of a suffix even knowing it's meaning.
One particularly revealing example was the naming of my cat. Despite her name ending in -o, which in Czech often aligns with neuter grammatical patterns, speakers around me consistently opted to modify the name with the feminine -a ending in order to maintain alignment with the animal’s biological sex. In doing so, they effectively modified the linguistic category of the name itself, prioritizing grammatical and social coherence over morphological expectation.
What this illustrates is not simply a preference for consistency, but the degree to which grammatical gender is treated as a system that must remain internally stable. Even when exceptions are technically permissible, speakers often adjust surrounding language to preserve categorical alignment. This is not because they are consciously thinking about gender at every moment of speech. It is because the language demands that such distinctions remain continuously operational.
Sten, effectively, struggles with the same concept. He wants to hear that -a. He needs it to process the information he receives from what he sees in opposition to what he hears. He prompts the Warden with the same question; If you're a woman, if you wish to be referred to and seen and understood in the social sense as a woman why do you refer to yourself as a man?
This interpretation also explains why his dialogue sounds awkward in English. He speaks as though he is translating concepts that do not map neatly onto the language available to him. The result resembles the discomfort many language learners experience when dealing with grammatical gender.
“Why is a chair feminine?”
The native speaker shrugs because the question itself misunderstands the category.
Likewise, Sten may be encountering a person whose social designation and observable function do not align according to the framework he expects.
Whether the writers intended this nuance is very unlikely. What matters to me personally is that the early lore allows it.
VI. Translation and Approximation
This brings us to one of the most debated terms in the series: notorious aqun-athlok.
We usually treat it as a direct analogy for “transgender.”
That translation is understandable, but I think it may be misleading.
If gender under the Qun is fundamentally a functional category, then aqun-athlok does not necessarily describe a person changing from one biological sex category to another. It describes a person whose social designation has been reassigned.
A useful comparison is professional rather than anatomical.
Imagine a cashier who demonstrates extraordinary aptitude for masonry. The state formally redesignates them as a mason. Their category changes because their function changes. Their pronouns change.
That does not mean they have become physically different. It means the system now recognizes them under a different classification.
Viewed this way, Iron Bull’s explanation to Krem becomes particularly interesting.
Bull understands Southern culture. He knows that the people around him think in terms of men and women as sex-based identities. So he translates the Qun into concepts they can understand, he does this quite frequently.
He tells Krem that his society assigned him one role and that he fought to attain another. That is the closest Common equivalent available.
This is not a lie. It is fundamentally what a translator does for colloquial speech. When a concept has no exact equivalent, translators choose the closest available approximation. English lacks a ready-made set of social-gender categories detached from sex and/or gender expression, so the dialogue maps them onto the familiar binary of "man" and "woman."
We already accept this process everywhere else in fantasy. When a character says "barbarian," we do not immediately assume there is a Greek language for the onomatopoeic term to be coined. When a character says "god," we don't assume their theology matches Christianity. We translate "Yes" as oui or si respectively from the context clues derived from previous information the question provides.
Under this reading, aqun-athlok becomes less “a transgender person in the Western sense” and more “a person recognised under a category different from the one originally assigned to them by the Qun.”
Before discussing disaster that was Veilguard, I want to make one final distinction.
Throughout this analysis I have deliberately avoided claiming that the Qun "has no gender." That statement would be obviously false.
The Qun has gender.
What I question is whether those genders are equivalent to the ones we instinctively imagine.
Translation being an act of approximation, there are words that simply do not survive intact when carried from one language into another. Each translation captures part of the meaning while leaving another part behind.
We accept this instinctively when discussing vocabulary. Oddly, we abandon that generosity when discussing cultures.
When a Qunari says "man," we assume they must mean exactly what an English speaker means by "man."
Why, though?
If the Qun genuinely organizes society according to principles foreign to Southern Thedas, why would we expect one of its central concepts to map perfectly onto Common?
Perhaps it does. It looks like it. The expression of hypermasculinity is certainly the same.
But perhaps "man" is simply the closest available word. This would hardly be unusual.
Sten's earlier confusion also indicates that a person with female features is not exempt from this category of "man", they are exempt from 'womanhood'.
Every translator eventually reaches a point where perfect accuracy becomes impossible. One must choose between preserving the literal words or preserving the underlying concept.
Bull translates the Qun not merely linguistically, but culturally. He knows when to omit details that would only confuse his audience. He knows when to substitute familiar concepts for alien ones. Above all, he understands that communication is not achieved by literal accuracy but by producing the same understanding in another person's mind.
When Bull explains aqun-athlok to Krem, he is not writing a philosophical treatise. He is explaining his culture to someone who lacks the conceptual vocabulary to understand it directly.
That conversation therefore deserves to be read as a translation rather than a dictionary definition.
VII. Why This Reading Matters
At this point, someone might reasonably ask whether any of this matters if the writers themselves probably intended a more conventional interpretation.
It does to me.
Because the value of a fictional culture is not limited to authorial intent. Sometimes worldbuilding accidentally creates implications richer than the story that contains it.
The Qun was designed to feel alien. Ironically, the most alien aspect of it may be one the games never fully explored: the possibility that its concept of gender is not a biological binary at all, but a system of social grammar.
And if that is true, then the later portrayal of Qunari gender becomes much more complicated.
Because a society that classifies people by function would not necessarily experience gender variance in the same way a society that classifies people by anatomy. A society without binary gender also lacks the conceptual absence of binary gender. This may be difficult to imagine because English constantly defines concepts by opposition. Terms such as "stay-at-home spouse" immediately evoke "wife" precisely because the expected word has been omitted, which makes true gender ambiguity an impossibility.
If this interpretation is accepted, then Taash's story in Veilguard raises a serious internal contradiction: a character who is unquestionably a warrior is nevertheless treated by their mother as though biological sex overrides the very system of role-based classification that earlier Qunari lore appeared to establish.
VIII. The Problem of Taash
Taash is not where my interpretation begins. It is where it begins to break.
Under the framework established throughout the earlier games, there is remarkably little ambiguity regarding Taash's social role.
Taash is a warrior. No one disputes this. Not Taash. Not the player. Not their mother. Not the Qun.
Had Taash been raised entirely under the Qun, they would have been a part of Antaam, the dialogue explicitly states this. Their unique talents would've landed them the role of the warrior.
Within the framework the games have outlined, this should already determine the relevant "gender."
If gender corresponds primarily to social designation, then Taash already belongs to the soldier category. By the internal logic established earlier in the series, Taash is already what Common translates as "a man."
This is precisely where Shathann becomes frustrating.
She is portrayed as someone deeply committed to preserving Qunari customs despite living outside the Qun. Much of her relationship with Taash revolves around those expectations.
Yet she consistently refers to Taash according to biological sex.
That strikes me as profoundly strange.
If anyone should instinctively categorize people according to the logic of the Qun, it should be Shathann.
Instead, she appears to do the opposite.
She acknowledges Taash as a warrior.
She never argues they lack the temperament for combat. She never insists they belong in another profession. She wants to encourage them to learn more about their own culture but it is not portrayed as pushing them to scholarly duty due to their physical characteristics. She is even suspicious of the notion of them adopting said Qunari customs.
Yet she continues to categorise them through anatomy.
Ironically, the character presented as enforcing the Qun becomes the one behaving least like the earlier games suggested a Qunari should.
The narrative frames this as a mother attempting to impose biological gender upon her child. If anyone should instinctively think in terms of Qunari categories, it is Shathann. And yet her language appears to prioritize anatomy over function.
Ironically, this places her in the opposite position one might expect. She is simultaneously using categories that the Qun itself would never have privileged in the first place, and is punished by the narrative for it. Portrayed as a close minded boomer that needs to listen to their child.
IX. A Quest for the Binary
This realisation led me to what I consider the greatest failure in Taash's story.
The game presents their travel to Minrathous as part of a search for language capable of expressing who they are. That is debilitating. Not because I disagree with the story being told, but because I believe it accidentally tells another story at the same time. A story about the writers and audience.
The story presents this as liberation from rigid expectations.
But under the linguistic framework I have proposed, something almost paradoxical happens.
Taash does not leave the Qun-based teachings to escape an anatomical gender binary.
They leave it to discover one.
Within the Qun, social designation would already provide the relevant category. "Man" and "woman," understood as identities rooted in biological sex, would not occupy the same conceptual space they do in Southern Thedas.
It is only through sustained contact with the South that Taash encounters a society where anatomy itself becomes the organizing principle.
Only then does the language become available to reject it.
Viewed this way, Taash's story ceases to be one of escaping the Qun's categories. It becomes the story of someone moving between two incompatible systems of classification.
The Qun is one of the most genuinely alien cultures in fantasy precisely because it organises society according to principles that often feel deeply unintuitive to modern readers.
Its understanding of personhood is collectivist rather than individual, its ethics are teleological rather than rights-based, its conception of freedom is almost the inverse of liberal philosophy.
Why should its understanding of gender resemble ours?
Why should it use the same conceptual categories at all?
Reducing Qunari gender to a direct analogue of contemporary Western discourse makes the culture easier to understand. And I'm afraid it is the philosophy the writers understand.
X. Conclusion
Ultimately, I am less interested in arguing that this interpretation is canon than I am in arguing that it is possible.
Language is never a neutral vehicle for ideas.
When I first encountered the Qun, this was simply how I understood it.
Coming from a language without gendered pronouns, I naturally interpreted the Qun's statements about gender through linguistics rather than through biology. Only through time, after discussing the series with English speaking fans, did I realize that most people had reached a very different conclusion.
Eventually, I did too.
I learned to read the Qun the way the games increasingly encouraged me to. I had to perform the very act of translation this long-ass post has been describing. I replaced my own conceptual framework with another.
That experience is precisely why I find this topic immensely gripping.
Language does not merely give us words. It gives us habits of interpretation. The assumptions we bring into fiction are often invisible until we encounter someone whose language encourages different assumptions. Whether my interpretation reflects the writers' intentions is ultimately irrelevant.
I am pretty sure it doesn't.
Still it's very compelling what their worldbuilding accidentally made possible.
In the end, one of the most interesting questions Dragon Age could have asked remains unanswered;
What does gender variance look like in a society that never organized gender around biological sex in the first place?
What does it mean to be genderqueer in a culture whose "genders" are functions rather than identities?
And what happens when such a culture encounters another whose language insists upon distinctions the first never needed to make?
Because if the Qun really was conceived as an alien civilization, then perhaps its greatest unrealised potential lays not in reversing familiar gender roles, but in imagining a society whose very concept of gender belongs to an entirely different universe.
That, to me, would have been far stranger. And far more worthy of the Qun.
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I actually think that science fiction has done everyone a disservice by presenting escaping to another planet as a remotely feasible near-term solution to problems on Earth.
(I mean, this last bit isn’t actually a great argument, because a lot of techniques proposed for terraforming involve such things as smashing asteroids into planets, blocking out their view of the sun for decades at a time, or seeding the entire planet’s surface with novel extremophile bacteria, which would be unthinkable on Earth; but the point still stands! It would be vastly easier to restore Earth to a healthy climate than to make Mars even as habitable as the peak of Mount Everest)
As Mars is fuck-off far away, it’s really expensive to send even a robot the size of a compact car there, half of all uncrewed missions there fail, and we don’t even know how to land a crewed one yet.
They’re talking about a city on Mars. We don’t even have a city on Antartica! And Antartica is 10000x more hospitable, because it at least has breathable air and readily available water. And Antartica can have an actual supply chain feeding the necessary stuff to it rather than needing to plan rockets. But no one ever suggests colonising Antartica to solve overpopulation, because its so obviously inhospitable and it would cost so much to set up a city there. Still so much better than Mars.
Or cities floating on the ocean! Or cities in the sahara desert! Or cities in orbit! These are all terrible, terrible ideas, but each one is far more feasible and practical than a colony on Mars is.
Did you see anything about how china returned Przwalskis horses to it’s steppe and effectively halted desertification bc keystone species can do stuff like that? Technically terra forming, perfectly doable to engineer/ restore all sorts of earth ecosystems, and SO MUCH MORE FEASIBLE than anything that can be done on Mars.
The fantasy of colonizing a new planet is the fantasy of a blank slate: imagine what we could do if we didn't have to take all this existing bullshit into consideration! Imagine if we didn't have to negotiate with different governments or people and their priorities or contend with our own environment; imagine if, having burned our house down, we could just buy a new one instead of trying to squat in the ruins and fix it! There's variants of this type of fantasy across all forms of literature, and by itself, there's nothing wrong with it. Escapism is fun!
But for a certain type of tech oligarch - the ones who claim to be inspired by science fiction even as they willfully misunderstand it - the deepest lure of a new planet is the prospect of dominion. It's not about fixing things or long-term survivability for the human race: it's the covetous desire to own, wholly and entirely, both the means of accessing our future and the future itself. There are no labor laws on Mars; no charters of human rights or taxes or checks on their power. They're already technofeudal princelings on Earth; if they can just get that first, crucial toehold on another planet, they imagine, they'll be emperors.
But precisely because they're princelings - which is to say, spoiled, selfish, egomaniacal sociopaths who combine the short-sighted greed of Midas with the hubristic idiocy of seagulls - the unfeasibility of their desires never occurs to them. In their minds, they've already done the impossible, and therefore all other impossible tasks must be equally within reach, provided they have enough money. Which, frankly, would be an insane fallacy even if they actually had done anything impossible, as opposed to engaging in garden-variety exploitation, villainy and corruption at a historically notable scale, but that doesn't occur to them, either, and for much the same reasons.
Namely: it is a truth universally acknowledged that a powerful, amoral man in possession of a cartoonishly large sum of money must be in want of things he can't actually purchase. This being so, we're left with a crop of naked would-be emperors tripping over their own exposed dicks while giving 90s JRPG villain speeches about how human water consumption is limiting the potential of AI or how knowledge should be metered out to the proles like electricity or how (and this is a good one) nobody needs to care about the staggering environmental and social costs of allowing billionaires to even exist in the first place because they're going to build us a city on Mars, guys, MARS, so why does it matter if Earth turns into a wasteland? Why would you try and put any checks on their power when it risks your potential access to a science fictional future they can only provide if allowed to be laws unto themselves?
Which is, coincidentally, why it's relevant that these guys never understood sci-fi in the first place: because men like them with ideas like theirs were pretty much never the good guys. To quote Kim Stanley Robinson's seminal 1992 classic Red Mars, the first book in a trilogy about what colonizing and terraforming a new world might actually look like:
Nadia pointed at it. "I did that. I did that. You damned radicals -" she jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow, hard- "you hate liberalism because it works."
He snorted.
"It does! It works in increments, over time, after hard labor, without fireworks or easy dramatics or people getting hurt. Without your sexy revolutions and all the pain and hatred they bring. It only works."
"Ah, Nadia." He put his arm over her shoulders, and they started walking again towards base. "Earth is a perfectly liberal world. But half of it is starving, and always has been, and always will be. Very liberally."
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Do you think it's immoral to use chatgpt for college assignments? I think it's unfortunately unavoidable.
It is absolutely immoral, completely counterproductive to the goal of learning things, and turns out incredibly subpar work.
As for unavoidable….you understand that the vast majority of people who have ever graduated college throughout history did so without ever once using AI, right? You understand that?
You understand that the point of writing papers isn’t just to have a paper with words on it, right? You understand that the entire point is to do the mental work necessary to put your learning into organized words, such that you actually learn it? And that if you outsource that to AI you are not learning?
Let's cost out the idea of AI use as an unavoidable part of university life, shall we? Imagine the following scenario:
A professor uses AI to generate their lecture outline and slides, because it saves them time; their students then use AI to summarize the lecture, because it's easier than taking notes themselves. The TA, overworked and underpaid, uses AI to generate the class assignments, which the students use AI to answer - and once they're handed in, the TA uses AI to grade them, too. The professor then uses AI to make the final exam, which the students use AI to answer, and which the professor and TA again use AI to grade. The semester ends, and none of the human participants have materially done any work. Who benefits from this?
It's not the professor, whose skills begin to atrophy due to cognitive offloading, nor is it the students, who never develop those skills in the first place. And it's certainly not TA, because in a scenario where this level of AI use is normalized - which is what the AI companies want - they've functionally made themselves redundant. If the AI can do a TA's job, then who needs a TA? Come to that, if the AI can do a professor's job, then who needs a professor? And if the AI can do a student's job, then who needs to be a student? Why do any of these people need to be here at all? Why even have a university? To which the tech giants reply: pfft, never mind the ever-mounting financial, environmental, ethical and social costs of AI - isn't using it just easier?
Well, yes - in the same way that it's easier to die than live. Death, after all, is a tremendously simplifying affair. You don't need to learn or study or struggle or suffer or love or err or improve or feel or encounter setbacks or wrestle with anything difficult at all when you don't exist - and this, too, ultimately, is the lure of AI: to outsource the fundamental business of being human; which is to say, of living. But as this would make a rather terrible sales pitch, it's presented instead, not just as convenience, but as an exclusive convenience - one whose power is predicated on others being too stupid or moral or Luddite to do likewise.
Thus: students are pitched on AI as a convenience to help them more quickly progress through their studies, while universities are pitched on AI as a convenience to help them more easily manage students. Both groups are told that using AI will help them keep up with their workload while surpassing the competition; that it will free up extra time to do more enjoyable things, and that, the more others use it, the more necessary it becomes to use it yourself. But the implication is still that the traditional professional, social and intellectual systems that AI intends to parasitize will continue to exist - because if they didn't, what would be the point in using AI to cheat at them?
The best-case scenario is that life becomes like an Olympics at which everyone is doping - which, as we recently saw with the Enhanced Games, turns out to be a fairly dismal prospect. Counter to the assumption that PEDs would cause the contestants to surpass all previous human limits, only one world record was actually (barely) broken and, in fact, multiple victories were claimed by non-enhanced athletes. In a lesson that AI shills would do well to learn from, it turns out that raw human effort, ingenuity and skill are actually the biggest factors in human success, and that whatever minor advantage you might gain from cheating is annihilated in a context where the whole field is doing it.
The worst-case scenario is that we irreparably break several centuries' worth of our most collectively vital institutions, innovations and accomplishments so that a handful of the very worst people on Earth can, briefly, be richer than god.
So, no: just because the AI industry has baited a hook for college students with the promise of Finish All Your Assignments Faster And Worse (While Getting Stupider) does not mean you have to swallow it. Use your own brain! Civilization will thank you for it.
Gotta tell you guys something wild in the Chinese fan sphere
So some fanartist drew a “sexy” (read: booby) version of a (cartoon) character who is traditionally very non-sexualised. Fans of the character got mad about it because it’s kind of groundbreaking how that character is written and portrayed and this art totally ignores the entire point of the character. They demanded the art be deleted. In response to that other people said, well what the fanartist did may be distateful but they have every right to draw what they’re into. The two sides fight for days and each starts a harassment campaign and even report their “opponents’” accounts.
So far so typical. But things eventually come to a head and they decide that this will be settled by votes - not through a poll. Through donations to a children’s education charity via each side’s portal. Whoever can get the highest amount of donation wins.
And that is how this charity received over 1 million in donations in three days lol. Oh btw the “freedom of expression” side won by a landslide (960k to 40k)
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Finally my sketches of Cae and Vel—the first being the image of them in my mind as I read and second after consulting refs and potential face claims~ :)
couple years ago i made a post listing a bunch of silly joke political ideologies and one of them was like "queer sex positive feudalism" and i was blissfully unaware that this basically describes the setting of vast swathes of the modern fantasy genre. Stop That
Like I'm sorry, but is the idea here that fantasy authors should only be writing about systems of government that we personally endorse? Are we allowed to write about feudalism and imperialism so long we hew to specifically Western historical precedent and include lashings of homophobia to make it clear that Gay People Wouldn't Do That? Can we invent queernormative fantasy settings if we promise promise promise to make them functional socialist democracies where all axes of structural oppression have been solved forever? Or can queer people only exist in a fantasy aristocracy if the point of the story is that they're there to overthrow it?
I just. Like. You are aware that kingdoms, empires, class-exclusive democracies, feudal clan systems and other profoundly non-modern forms of governance are, in fact, a loadbearing part of fantasy as a genre, regardless of whether it's being written about queer people or straight people? And that for almost the entire history of the genre, fantasy stories that so much as mentioned queer people, let alone featured them prominently, were thin on the ground? And that it's fair actually for queer people to both enjoy, and to want to see themselves in, fantasy stories?
If you personally don't want to read about any of that, then cool! You do not have to! Literally nobody is forcing you! But complaining that the Magic Feudalism Genre now contains Magic Feudalism With Gay People is very much like asking why the soup kitchen sells soup.
couple years ago i made a post listing a bunch of silly joke political ideologies and one of them was like "queer sex positive feudalism" and i was blissfully unaware that this basically describes the setting of vast swathes of the modern fantasy genre. Stop That
I already posted about this over on Bluesky, but for anyone wondering how dire the current glut of AI-enabled, author-targeted scam emails is, this is what the spam folder for my professional email address currently looks like:
Like. It's absolutely fucking insane. I go into more detail on the Bluesky thread, but these scammy slopportunities are everywhere at the moment, and the ones that make it past the spam filters into my main inbox are worse. Every author I know is being inundated with this shit, and it makes me rabid.
it is wild to me that you're letting your 4 year old have pizza that late at night. my instinct is to be like what is wrong with you but you've been absolutely rocking my world view on food rules for the past couple of years honestly
If you are hungry you should eat, always. We're having pizza cause we're on vacation and that's what's available honestly a lot of the time when she gets the night time hungers she wants scrambled eggs lol.
We let her eat and then she goes to bed and everyone is happy!
One of the most eye-opening aspects of parenthood for me has been how socially ingrained it is for parents to be coercive and controlling about food access in the name of manners. Like, scientifically, we know that kids have much smaller stomachs than adults, and also much faster metabolisms. That makes sense! They're growing! And we also know, scientifically, that kids have different palates than adults - that bitter flavours are much more unpleasant for most toddlers, for instance, and that certain kids have strong sensory aversions to certain textures or tastes. This latter point is also true of adults, too - and it's completely fair!
But you would never demand that an adult clear their plate once they said they were full, or shame them for their inability to finish because they had a sandwich earlier. You wouldn't force them to eat every part of an unfamiliar meal they ordered at a restaurant that they turned out not to like, or tell them that they didn't get to have a mid-morning snack as punishment for not having eaten breakfast. And yet it's considered completely normal to do this to children - especially very small children - whose bodies constantly want fuel.
Which isn't to say it's pointless to teach kids manners around food and mealtimes - it's not! How to sit at a table, how to use a knife and fork, how to behave at a restaurant, how to politely ask for seconds or express that you're full (I've had an elegant sufficiency, was my grandmother's delightful go-to phrase), how to join in the conversation once you're done with your food, how to make a good faith attempt at trying unfamiliar dishes, how to broaden your palate as you get older, how to behave as a guest at someone else's table - all of this is important to learn!
But instead of this, what a lot of parents actually do - and most often because they themselves were raised with it - is treat food access as a test of obedience. A child who asks for a snack is whiny, because you just had breakfast!, even though it's developmentally better for a child to eat multiple small meals throughout the day than three big ones. A child who refuses a given food is picky, because you should just eat what you're given!, even though most adults would never extend this same attitude to themselves. A child who eats three square meals a day and still wants more is greedy, because you've already had enough!, even though we'd consider it wholly normal for an adult - and especially a physically active adult - to want extra.
And at the same time, once kids are old enough to feed themselves, they're often discouraged from doing so, their hunger treated as a shameful inconvenience. Sure, if a particular food is expensive, difficult to acquire, needed for a particular dish that someone is planning to cook or belongs to a specific household member, then it makes sense to say, "hey, you can only have X if you ask, for Y reason," because that's about teaching responsibility and courtesy, not punishing hunger. It's also fair to say that certain foods, like ice cream, are only for dessert, or require permission, because kids need help learning restraint. And once they can write, you should teach them that, if they take the last of something, they should put it on the shopping list so you know to get more.
But a lot of people still just... act annoyed that their kids are hungry, and particularly when that hunger - as is developmentally normal! - falls outside of allotted mealtimes. Because they grew up being punished for being hungry, and so it's built into their bones that food-seeking behaviour is somehow inherently rude, when eating when you're hungry is actually one of the healthiest things we can do.
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hihi! I saw your post a while ago about The Weight and the Measure (eee!) and actually came across a listing on the ARC website (double eee! immediately stopped in my tracks) that listed the book under the title Godburned -- is Godburned the new final title? super excited to crack this one open
Ahh, thank you, yes! I've actually been meaning to post about this - my next book has indeed been retitled as Godburned, though we're keeping The Weight and the Measure as the series title, which I think works very nicely. The new release date is 26 January 2027, and ARCs are now becoming available! I'm really excited for people to start to read this one; though I should clarify for anyone coming to it from A Strange and Stubborn Endurance and All the Hidden Paths that, while there's very much a queer romance element, the story itself is not a romantasy. By this I mean that the romance is not the central thing that drives the plot, though it is still heavily character-driven. It's also what I'd call maximalist fantasy, in that there is a LOT of worldbuilding. Gods! Magic! Giant foxwolves! Questions about the nature of fundamental nature justice! People with horns!
Because I'm a fool and a rube, I just now realized I forgot to post an actual blurb for Godburned, which would presumably be a useful thing for potential readers to have! SO:
In the Jaosi Empire, magic is gifted by the gods – a blessed reward for the worthy devout. But not for Kas. Twice, the gods have come uninvited, investing him with their power at the worst moments of his life, and twice, Kas has refused to serve.
When three teenagers go missing in the poorest part of Jahovai, where neither the city guards nor the Measure bother to pursue justice, Kas knows that if he doesn’t find them, no one will. But when his search goes devastatingly wrong, a third god visits him – and in the aftermath, Kas is conscripted to the Measure.
Peacekeeper and investigator Nema is tasked with inducting Kas into his new life. A nobleman who represents everything Kas despises, Nema nonetheless offers to help his new partner find the missing boys as a gesture of goodwill.
But the search soon turns ugly, pointing to corruption at the highest levels. Nema and Kas must learn to cooperate, and fast: together, they may uncover the truth, but the more they learn, the more they have to lose . . .
hihi! I saw your post a while ago about The Weight and the Measure (eee!) and actually came across a listing on the ARC website (double eee! immediately stopped in my tracks) that listed the book under the title Godburned -- is Godburned the new final title? super excited to crack this one open
Ahh, thank you, yes! I've actually been meaning to post about this - my next book has indeed been retitled as Godburned, though we're keeping The Weight and the Measure as the series title, which I think works very nicely. The new release date is 26 January 2027, and ARCs are now becoming available! I'm really excited for people to start to read this one; though I should clarify for anyone coming to it from A Strange and Stubborn Endurance and All the Hidden Paths that, while there's very much a queer romance element, the story itself is not a romantasy. By this I mean that the romance is not the central thing that drives the plot, though it is still heavily character-driven. It's also what I'd call maximalist fantasy, in that there is a LOT of worldbuilding. Gods! Magic! Giant foxwolves! Questions about the nature of fundamental nature justice! People with horns!
