Then stop having a meta conversation and actually talk about the issue at hand.
Oh, well, how can I resist such an welcoming invitation as that?
If forced to cold-boot a conversation on this, then I have to go back to something like the cultural ethics stuff as part of the simulation of a living world that could be rolled into the system.
One of the other threads on naming recently had someone pop up and talk about how this game has virtually no distinction of gender, and they like it that way.
If you look at the game, there is exactly one gender-restricted job I can think of, and it is bizarrely the elven military commander, the "princess". Or in other words, the only gender discrimination of any kind in DF is against males, and only in the elven culture.
If you look at real-life history, however, you'll find that, although in early cultures that were hardly much more than tribes of nomads or farmers, there were a huge variety of governing systems and cultures, the most major empires all tended to be patriarchal (see the Rome example earlier in the thread, but also China, which treated women as commodities to be traded, as well,) and left their stamp on culture.
This isn't entirely accidental, either. There is a direct link between how much time a woman spends pregnant and how much power and control over her life there is, as well as the general educational background of society at large. The more that a culture focused its gender relations purely upon spitting out as much offspring as possible (which meant devaluing women to mere baby-production tools), the more that the younger sons of the local farmers could not inherit their family's land, and had to join the army to make a living for themselves, whereupon they could be gleefully thrown against the ramparts of enemy cities to die for the profit of the empire. Plenty of expendable soldiers meant more land to conquer.
Homosexuality plays a part in this, as well. Part of the reason that homosexuality was demonized in Christianity was its relationship with sex in general. Thanks to the Gnostic influence upon the religion when it was young, it viewed any sort of physical pleasure as sinful in general, but allowances were made for sex purely for procreation (which the actual Gnostics did not allow for, since they thought of life as an abomination to begin with, but that's another story) so that helped shape the entire "zerg rush" outlook on producing as much offspring as possible.
If you have homosexual relations, it obviously isn't for the offspring that can be produced.
That said, I seriously doubt this is necessarily the sort of path that DF really wants to travel down. After all, the only gender discrimination already in the game is for elven princesses.
When this topic last came up, I mentioned that dwarves, being generally the "conservative"/"lawful" types would be the ones more likely to have a stern eye on relations that were not "traditional", at least as dwarves are generally reckoned, while the more "chaotic" elves would be more ready to embrace the "gay transgender cross-species lifestyle".
That said, it might be an amusing twist if the elves were the staunch anti-gay crowd, saying something about how it goes against what the "nature spirit" wants, while dwarves were the more permissive culture. If nothing else, it would further drive the unique flavor of DF into being more distinct, although I'm not sure if people need more reason to dislike elves.
Sexuality can also be a major narrative force in and of itself, however.
Some of the
greatest spy stories of the Cold War occurred within the gay community, and it used to be that gays were often the best spies or double agents, simply because having to keep yourself in the closet your entire life meant you already had plenty of natural training in keeping secrets, fooling others about your intentions, and keeping others in the dark.
One of the things I've talked about in a handful of other threads is the notion of having multiple sets of loyalties that are ranked in power, and determine the outcomes of potential loyalty spirals as well as conflicts between whether you follow the leader of your civ when they are clearly acting outside the bounds of their civ's ideals. (As in, does one just follow orders or protest because they are more loyal to those ideals than the person giving the orders or the authority they possess.)
In the case of a society that represses homosexuals, it creates the dualistic identity that provides an even greater tension where loyalties are naturally torn - a gay man in a society that would execute him if they ever found out might be naturally a little more sympathetic to any enemy of his nation than any other citizen, especially if they are more understanding of who he is.
More than simply throwing "this person has a 10 in honesty, and 5 in respecting other people's property so he's more likely to be the rat that sells his country out" sort of mechanic in, putting things in terms of conflicting loyalties as a person fleshes out a storyline.
A gay pacifistic abolitionist turning against a repressive tyrant that has taken control of their country and instituted the slave trade as part of a means to fund their expansionist war effort makes more human characters than having a 2 in traditionalism, and as such hating the nobles just because.
And wow, took too long on this, so many ninjas.
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Topic: Homosexual Dwarves (Read 31880 times)