#sspellweaver

QA testers pick up on a lot of things but it’s up to the devs to actually fix it -is a qa tester- and DAI was a huuuge game. Maybe if they’d had another 6 months of polish time it’d have been better.

Blame EA is what I’m saying

To be fair, all the previous codex entries have been from a human perspective. I think I remember Liara complaining about how humans assume their gender?

Yes. True. The codex says the asari are an “all-female race” - Liara contradicts that in one scene by saying:

"Most of the inaccuracies are centered around our mating rituals. My species is mono-gendered. "Male" and "female" have no real meaning for us."

The biology entry speaks of them having only one gender but that’s about it. The codex also uses female pronouns. But do they identify as female? No. It has no meaning to them. They don’t identify as male either, only as asari. 

And true, there are issues with the translator. 

When talking about Benezia's other partner who conceived her, Liara says:

"She rarely spoke of her partner, though I know my father --if you want to use that term--was another asari."

When you meet Matriarch Aethyta (Benezia’s partner) in ME2, she talks about her past saying “When I was a girl” - the in-game explanation is that the translator will translate the asari word she used as “girl.” The out of game explanation is that Bioware is not good enough to deal with subtleties and just uses the simplest words. She could also have used a term specific to asari, when I was a Maiden. And even then, those are already translated words reinforcing they’re “female” - Maiden, Matron, Matriarch... 

In ME3, you have this dialogue:

Aethyta: Yeah... Matriarch Benezia was... was her mother, and she doesn't know it, but I was her father. Shepard: You mean you were her other mother, right? Aethyta: No, I didn't pop her out. Hell, she's never even met me. Shepard: Sorry, if you were human, you'd both be called the mother, regardless of which one gave birth. Aethyta: Well, I'm not human, am I? Anthropocentric bag of dicks.

I mean, it’s all fine and good, but it’s still one conversation in a sea of bad ones. And the issues with the translators don’t fully explain the confusion about the asari. In the end, I think you’re right about the codex. It isn’t precise or/and accurate. It’s confusing enough (mono-gendered? all-female?) that people simply believe the asari are female.

The new codex entries in Andromeda try to rectify that.

They’re no longer presented as an all-female race: “Though they appear feminine to many species, asari are a mono-gendered species.”

Small steps I guess. But it is interesting. It begs the question: when can we blame Bioware and when should we focus on in-game explanations? 

Me, I think Bioware is definitely at fault. They’re not always consistent with them. That one scene about them prefering different pronouns in MEA - it’s good but never applied in the trilogy. To me that shows a bad handling of their own lore. Because it’s one thing for the codex to say this or that but the asari in the game aren’t tied to the codex. So why aren’t they constantly correcting people who automatically use female pronouns?

It’s really sweet of you to say that, but

I’m sure as hell not moving to the States, especially not Texas

I’m not a very good writer and have 0 qualifications

I’ve said way to many negative things about the company to ever be hired by them lol

make food?

I've been thinking about terms lately, sorry

sspellweaver replied to your post “sspellweaver replied to your post “comavampure replied to your post...”

**blind

sspellweaver replied to your post “sspellweaver replied to your post “comavampure replied to your post...”

Though as a sapphic leaning Bi maybe I have a blond spot

sspellweaver replied to your post “sspellweaver replied to your post “comavampure replied to your post...”

Huh, maybe it's a generational thing. As a gender queer individual I've liked the term since the way I've seen it used seemed flexible, more flexible than lesbian anyway. Same with wlw, when, for example, it's a post talking about being attracted to women. Of course outside of that context it can be used to downplay biphobia, etc. But as a way to describe part of my sexuality, instead of the whole thing. Though I guess it depends on what posts we've been exposed to.

Huh I always thought of it as a general term, because saying "lesbian" to describe female same sex attraction seemed non-inclusive.

Then again in the op they say "gay and sapphic" so yeah in that context it's not good

I think that’s how a lot of people use it and part of the intent, but in practice in often seems to become a way to avoid properly naming queer women who aren’t gay and to skip over the part of their sexuality (and often gender since it’s inevitably exclusive of nb/genderqueer/gnc people). It’s often used in a way that demands bi/pan/multi people prioritize their attraction too, so that calls for solidarity are often as much about putting aside issues related to biphobia as they are anything else. 

If a queer woman who’s not gay chooses to identify as sapphic/wlw, more power to her. If the label is being applied to make clear what hurdles that woman has to leap over to be seen as important by other queer women, often queer women with a much stronger voice within the community, then I’m not okay with it.