So I’d understand why the asari wouldn’t have gendered anything on their own, but you think that once they saw other races, at least some would choose to present as male. Every asari in the three games is presented as female, and I think it shows a super simple understanding of gender and lack of imagination.
It’s really kinda boring that every asari would choose to be female, especially since I’m sure each individual has their own preferences and attractions. I’m realizing how shallow Mass Effect’s politics are, and how much broader their world could have been, instead of reducing each alien race into Roman wannabes, sexy blue ladies, and the lizard proletariat.
TLDR: No male asari feels like trans erasure.
It's because instead of examining the trope of "All aliens act a particular way" they leap whole hog into it
It's the same problem with a lot of fantasy stuff, where you get "All orcs are savage brutes, except this one who acts more like the Noble Savage"-style racist stereotypes
It's lazy writing built on the back of other people who also didn't bother to put more effort into it
It’s because instead of examining the trope of “All aliens act a particular way” they leap whole hog into it
That's not fair.
They also mix in orientalist sexualisation -- the Asari are coded as vaguely Asian, they are sexually compatible with all species etc -- and good ol sexism: the explicitly feminine species is all about psychological power and "magic".
It’s the same problem with a lot of fantasy stuff, where you get “All orcs are savage brutes, except this one who acts more like the Noble Savage”-style racist stereotypes
Now that i'm thinking about this, this (racist) exceptionalism also reinforces the great man theory of history. They think of us all us as the unwashed masses, except for The Good Ones that "rise to the top" (usually are rich or are particularly talented/lucky and who politically reinforce the status quo).
This is why the Orcs in Elder Scrolls interest me. They are outcasts and "savages" for material (or magical I guess) reasons, and they don't fall into the "the good ones" shit often from what I have seen.
Others have pointed out Bioware's reason. I'd think that since Asari biology is mono-gendered, they'd not see other genders in the same way, since they're things only other species have. To be a Masculine or non-binary Asari would be a step beyond, a cultural artifact that only happens in some other species. In fact I'd suggest that most Asari would identify as agender as there literally is no such thing as a gender role in Asari culture.
That said, the Asari are fairly Xenophilic, and it's not beyond the realm of possibility that one might identify with the gender roles of another culture. A Male Asari might well be declaring they're not Asari at all, but the species or culture whose gender role they most identify with or perform.
tl:dr Male Asari are Otherkin.
male Asari are otherkin
Damn
Seriously though I think this is the take if you want to read it more charitably(?), and I also could see this as the direction BioWare takes the Asari in future games.
I’d like to point out too that Liara herself says that even though she uses feminine pronouns and everything, she doesn’t exactly identify as female by human standards. I also think it’s important to remember, if you wanna get deeper into the lore, Asari live for a thousand years and have only been interacting with alien species for something like 2600 years by the time humans showed up on the scene. I could imagine that as waaaay more time goes by, each successive generation more readily adopts other cultures’ ideas about gender identity and such similar to the way there seems to be an explosion of trans identifying folks IRL these days because of the increasing exposure everyone has to related concepts. People develop the vocabulary and stuff to explain what they’re feeling.
But I mean yeah, sexy blue alien chicks. Safe to say the creators of Mass Effect weren’t thinking about much of this.
I gotta say I can’t imagine why a species that exists outside of our gender binary would willingly enter into it and take on the negative aspects of binary conformity. It’s like “oh my people’s entire history has been devoid of gender politics and we’ve just been vibing but man feeling guilty about having emotions really sounds neat, maybe I will arbitrarily segment off portions of my personality as culturally taboo just for the fun of it :D” A gender binary is the construct of a lower order of economic development and, as we see in our own society, fades away with further development and the loss of need to sanction labor roles by gender identity
I get what you're saying, but especially in some sci fi world where magical zero mass bubbles explain everything, does exploring your gender identity have to be a negative experience? Plus who's to say an alien species outside our gender binary like the Asari would just adopt our binary alone or even the whole range of human gender expression alone? They can mate with whatever they want somehow and there's like at least 10 spacefaring species in that universe that we really don't know anything about when it comes to their ideas of gender. There weren't female Turians until like Mass Effect 3, and I don't think there's been a voiced female Salarian for example. BioWare could easily be like "yeah in Salarian culture there are 6 genders and only 6" or something in future games. This stuff could really go in any direction we could imagine.
Yeah, the imposition of human gendered concepts like male, female, even cis and trans are kind of not applicable to Asari. While the game does depict them all as blue female bodied people, I'm also reminded of that atmospheric background conversation you get in either Mass Effect 2 or 3, wherein a group of diverse aliens each argue that the Asari resemble their species the most, before concluding that they must be perceiving the species differently, possibly because of some kind of Asari effect on other species. Naturally, they're designed the way they are because it's a AAA game and booba is well received, so both canonically and cynically, the Asari look the way they do because you're human.
His husband dies right at the beginning of the game
Wasn't it something like six months to a year earlier? It happened during the collector raid on Horizon.
There's a conversation with Cortez quite early in the game with him talking about the anniversary of his husband's death, I can't remember the exact timeline but
I'm sure there's at least a year gap between 2 and 3.disregard this, I just looked it up and there's a six month jump from the 2's last DLC, and the start of 3.I feel like there's some timeline weirdness, or maybe ME2 including its DLC plus whatever dicking around the crew did after that before everyone went their separate ways and Shepard and Joker turned themselves in to the Alliance military lasted several more months after the raid on Horizon, because I'd have sworn Shepard was in custody for only half a year or so.
Although the timeline seems weird in general, like all of your old crew seems way more settled in and established than if it had only been six months or even a year, like Jack ending up an instructor at that school or Garrus ending up as an advisor to the Turian leadership with his own taskforce, etc.
Even the jump between ME2's intro and the start of the game proper feels weird. Like over the course of two years Garrus not only founds a vigilante organisation but then promptly loses them all in a siege, for example.
Wait it’s Cortex? I’ve been assuming it was james the whole time lol.
I could be underestimating the mood in the late aughts, since I was a literal middle schooler, but it moreso seems like it wasn’t even a concern instead of an intentional omission.
The fact that they made Thane straight late in development to avoid controversy upsets me way more than it should.
Just let male Shepard fuck the sexy fishman bioware.
I’m demanding a refund from EA right now because the cowards devs didn’t even put a readable version of Fornax in game
Gonna be honest, I don't want to see what late 2000s bioware would have done with a trans character, and I really don't want to know what gamers would have thought. You're totally right, but I think them leaving that out might be kinder.
Don't want to know how that would have went. Mass effect couldn't even commit to making a character bisexual. Jack is bisexual on the face of it, but will only get into a relationship with a male Shepard.
It is kind of weird how the bioware fantasy game series is more progressive than the sci fi game series when it comes to sexuality and gender.
