1. #31
    It makes me ignorant if I do not care about things like this while playing a computer game? Wow, then it's really easy to be ignorant. What are you going to do with all your christmas presents? You will give them to some charity society, won't you? Otherwise you are ignorant. Well, kind of...

    Marko
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  2. #32
    Also, Sue Richards was Invisible Girl for about twenty years. Just got bumped up to "woman"ly status not too terribly long ago.

    As far as political correctness... stereotypes come from somewhere. Some of them are ignorant and some are right on the money. I for one am a smart guy who can be a real bonehead. My wife laughs at me when I see a cool commercial or something else and instantly regress about twenty years (to a ten year old).

    To bring this back to point... Maybe this adds to the story of Uru, since women's absence from culture and history would make Yeesha an even bigger heretic in the eyes of the original guilds and, currently, with the DRC.

    Back to off-topic...read The Da Vinci Code for a slap in the face regarding male/female places in society and religion.
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  3. #33
    mszv1's Avatar Junior Member
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    Good thread.
    I never read the books, just played the games. However, after being on a bunch of boards, and reading all sorts of good summaries and observations, I seemed to have learned some things about the ages. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell, the D'ni women didn't get to do the "good stuff" - join the nifty guilds, write ages, that sort of thing. It appears to be a society that has gender inequity as one of it's features, but it's not the only feature of the world. One other thing to note is that there also appears to be no gay people in D'ni - everyone is straight.

    It's the story, the age, the world, that the world creators decided to write. Who knows what reasons they had for going in the direction they did. (I have my theories on why they did what they did, but I won't bore you with them). I also don't think the world creators were so prescient as to have thought about all the implications. Sure - if you want to do an online game, perhaps the world of the D'ni could have been different, and the nifty roles could have gone to more different sorts of people. That's not the D'ni culture and world that constitues the world framework.

    What is nice is that when you play all the games, you can be your contemporary self - you don't have to be a person from another age or a gender or sexual orientation different from the one you identify with. The games support you as you want to present yourself, which I think is really nice. I always felt that contemporary me became a personal friend of Atrus, and then Catherine. The other good thing is that in Uru, this game, we aren't traditional D'ni, so we don't have to do any of the imbalance thing. We all get to do the good stuff. I think that's good.

    A few more things - of course men can write sympathetic female characters and vice versa. Literature is filled with works where the characters aren't like the person who wrote the work. We are human, we have sympathies and imagination and intelligence - we can do it. Finally, if you are looking for alternate worlds where there are different kinds of societies, genders, relationships between people, and different kinds of characters, the world of science fiction (fantasy too but especially science fiction), has really opened up - there's lots of different writers and stories now. Back in, oh the 1960s, the field expanded, and all sorts of writers got into the sci-fi genre, and they are going strong.


    All for now,
    Regards,
    mszv

    (really mszv, but for some reason this computer won't log me on as mszv, maybe because my home computer is still logged on as mszv)
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  4. #34
    marko - sorry bud, I was just jesting - it was a joke. Didn't mean it to come off rude.

    I really did enjoy The Da Vinci Code - neat book. I think I might read it again soon

    Free Urulive!*

    Ki: 00545671

    *for the first month. I'm willing to pay for the rest.
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  5. #35
    Srikandi -- oh good, I wasn't the only one who noticed... ^_^

    I've played the games, read the books, bought the calendars etc. Love this stuff!

    But yeah, I noticed a kind of offhand, unconscious sort of assumption of patrifocality. I figured it was as much a result of relatively ordinary guys in our Western society as anything, it's so pervasive.

    The handful of strong women seemed more a self-conscious attempt at PC -- a thrown bone, maybe, though an earnest one. They mean well: See those D'ni? Not such great guys, right? See?

    Not enough women writing fanfic?? LOL!!! You're looking in the wrong places then...heh...
    There are worlds within worlds, Chrysta!
    Oh, you mean MREDU fanfic... ^^;;;;;
    Nevermind!

    No room for women in casting, eh? Oh my.
    Authors are the gods of their books -- we can cast whomever we want wherever we want. The creators of the MREDU worlds took the directions they wanted to take, right from the foundations. They made a choice, or a series of choices. They have their set of cultural assumptions just like the rest of us.
    They've done lovely, amazing things! They've raised a lot of bars...and these worlds appeal to a lot of different kinds of people from all over. That's nothing to sneeze at. Bravo bravo Cyan et al!!!

    There's just this little twitch... and some of us maybe wanna talk about it, think about it a bit...

    Human historical societies... well there's the whole lump of egalitarian -- look! We even have a word for it! The gender roles in egalitarian societies true are rigidly defined, but there's more balance than maybe a lot of us from our patriarchal perspectives can understand.
    Pre-Kurgan Europe and Asia...just a thought.
    Yes, I've read The Chalice and the Blade.

    Ooooh! Gender issues beyond male/female!
    Can open, worms everywhere! ^___________^
    But, y'know, I'm not gonna start that here, I have plenty of other planets to visit for those discussions...

    I have been one of those young women who didn't want to talk about the issue anymore. Back in high school and early college, I voraciously read McCaffrey, Zimmer Bradley, even Lackey... and I got so sick and tired of the whole woman in a man's world thing! The books I read now, the stories I write now exist in a different place, by and large, but that's beside the point.
    Lois McMaster Bujold, anyone? Spider Robinson?
    But now I bow with respect to my ancestresses who struggled and survived so much to reshape the world I now live so happily in. I don't think we're done with this journey yet, but maybe we can get far enough along that the backlash won't be so bad.
    Ask those Afghani girls how it is...

    Yes... Da Vinci Code... verra verra interestin'...
    I'm a little more interested in prehistory and earlier history than that, but I enjoyed it. The Eight was more fun, IMO, though. And which one is being made into a movie? Yep.

    Back to MREDU -- As I read the books and calendar journal entries and played the games... I did keep coming back to the thought: Catherine/Katron [and by the way that arbitrary renaming was more than a bit irritating, but oh well. =_=] wrote more Ages than the torus [and Tay?], didn't she???? If it's Catherine's journals that have given us all this info, where are the rest of *her* Ages? I'd really, REALLY like to go exploring those... *wistful look*

    --Ronda-- in Cavern
    KI # 589268
    When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
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  6. #36
    A veritable treasure-trove of MREDU fanfic, much of it penned by women.

    Promminent (and highly recommended) on the list are Renae, sepdet, M'lah Sihfay, RivenRebelPoet, Kah'teh, and Tiana Luthien.

    And more to be found here, though I can't seem to locate the table of contents that I know was there... Again, strongly recommend sepdet, M'lah, Renae, as well as Catherine, and Anna Catherine (these are just the women [and only those that I remember immediately off the top of my head at 6:00 am], if you want recommendations on the rest of 'em, lemme know )

    ----------
    Alahmnat
    Guild of Archivists, DPWR.NET
    Uru Forum Moderator, Community Assistant
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  7. #37
    I haven't read any of the Myst novels, but I can kind of see what you mean by sexism and I can empathize. But what ticks me off (and I know this was mentioned before)is that in so many TV shows (especailly ones with a female as the main character), novels, etc. males are shown as big lumbering unscrupled, emotionless brutes with nothing better to do then fight constantly and try to "score" on girls. Males are often used as props to, in some forms of media more then females. The jerk, mister perfect, are all classic but ignored examples of using males as props, but no one cares because so many people believe these stereotypes.
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  8. #38
    OMG Can this thread get any longer? Yes.

    Sorry guys, I haven't read all the posts, but you keep talking about Tasera, Atrus' mother. Who is this? I never heard of her! I've read all 3 books.

    Is there another book I don't know about? Was Tasera in Book of Ti'Ana - was she Aitrus (the grandfather)'s mother? I don't remember that book very well. Or did we meet Gehn's girlfriend in Book of Ti'ana? Also, wasn't Atrus' mother called Keta in Riven? (The woman in the hologram in Gehn's office?

    Was Marrim from Riven? I thought she was from Averone!

    I actually thought (reading the books in D'ni in Uru) that it was very even. Read the book on Marriage - male and female roles are exactly the same.

    And I don't think anyone pointed this out. For the first time I've EVER seen in ANY game, when you create a new character, the DEFAULT gender is FEMALE! Interesting. I've only ever seen male, or none, in every other game.
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  9. #39
    <BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by graham_614:
    (Now was it Sue Storm or Richards - I thought she married Reed at some point...?)<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

    Yes, Reed is her husband. It was Sue Storm (sister of Johnny) up until that time.

    Emma
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  10. #40
    <BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>And I don't think anyone pointed this out. For the first time I've EVER seen in ANY game, when you create a new character, the DEFAULT gender is FEMALE! Interesting. I've only ever seen male, or none, in every other game. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

    I think that's because female comes first alphabetically, that way they CANT be accused of sexism.
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