Gender and the spirits

<Split off from Phantaskippy's guide to Phantasms, part 2: Vital Strength of the Earth >

Small observation: Except for maybe Thunderspeaker, who judging by the evident mammary glands on the artwork is quite female. 12 gender-neutral spirits, 1 female, 0 male, Yay equality.

That nit pik aside, loving these guides PS. Vital Strength of the Earth is the next spirit on my list to try out. I've only played the game once so far using River who at first seemed weak until I figured out the power of the Dahan.

Thunderspeaker takes human form, it may dress up as a human female, but that neither makes it human nor female.

Yup, this.

(IIRC, it's manifested as male on at least one of its Unique Power Cards. It doesn't have a familial relationship with the Dahan, so its gender expression isn't especially important in its dealings with them.)

Btw, Ninja Monkey's count yield 13 spirits. Am I missing one?

Nope, I think they miscounted. There are 12 total spirits published: 8 in the base game, 2 in Branch & Claw, and 2 promos.

Miscounted. I may still be a little irked by the Kickstarter backers who railed against the masculine invaders but completely ignored the fact there were 11 gender neutral spirits and 1 gender specific, female, spirit based on the artwork alone. The idea that equality can be achieved through inequality has always irked me.
I had an issue with the masculine invaders. But my issue wasn’t the fact they were male. My issue was that yet again men were being portrayed as the aggressor. I’ve honestly had enough of men in media being portrayed as overly aggressive or as man childs.
As a father of 2 women in training and 1 man in training I’m a strong proponent for true equality not equality of the moment.
Look no further than the latest Kickstarter for Sentinels of Earth Prime for an example of equality of the moment. Outrage over Siren’s outfit but, until called out, no outrage over Dr. Metropolis’ outfit. Both needed to be changed, no question. But the focus immediately went to Siren.

I’m off my soapbox now.

As a person of Hispanic heritage, don’t get me started on La Capitan and the offensive stereotype of her names which I don’t see mentioned on these forums.

Ok, now I’m really off the soap box. I really do love these games even though some aspects may offend me personally. I try not to believe people are intentionally trying to be offensive.

As one of those complainy Kickstarter people, I see it as "redressing the balance" rather than "equality through inequality". There's a huge abundance of games where you can chose any flavour of character as long as it's male (or occasionally a single cookie-cutter hypersexualised female), and this game is a mere drop in the ocean compared with them.

I mean in principle I'm all for balanced representation, but honestly I think there are a lot of male players out there who need to know how it feels to be forced to pick a character of a gender they don't identify with like females often have to. The same (male) players who tell women "you don't have to play as female, it's just a game, get over it!" are also the ones who get extremely upset about games which have predominantly female representation so they can't play as male. I don't think we'll get proper equal representation until they see things from the other side, so to speak.

Apart from all that, even Thunderspeaker WAS female, 1 female vs 0 males isn't exactly a massive imbalance.

Men aren’t the aggressors. COLONIALISM is the aggressor. This is not a game about fighting men, it’s a game about fighting faceless empires, and if you want to defend colonialism then that’s a whole other discussion.

EDIT: Oh, and inasmuch as men are the enemy, that’s pretty much par for the course historically. I can get on board with arguing against historical accuracy when it promotes inequality, but when you don’t like that history makes you look bad I have less sympathy.

Mods, part of this thread needs split off at this point as we are no longer discussing strategy for Vital Strength of Earth anymore.  

As to my own thoughts on it.  We are talking colonial times and realistically invaders would have been male.   However, I don't think looking at the Explorers pieces I would say they appear as one gender or the other they seem like soulless figures holding tiny flags.  Now in the artwork it would be more male but still would be expected for the majority of people invading during that timeframe.  

What Powerhound said. The big issue I had (and I think others as well) with the original explorer design was not so much that they were male so much as that they were/are meant to symbolically represent how threatening/scary the invaders are, and they were using male design elements to represent this.

I’m all for mixed representation for miscellaneous figures in games, but this is a game where it would have been reasonable to have entirely male figures because they represent a male dominated profession. But the symbolic link between ‘male’ and ‘threatening’ isn’t doing our society any favors. The explorers aren’t scary because they are male, they are scary because they are different, and I think that the current scuplts do an excellent job of conveying that.

For conquest-style invaders, certainly, but not for the immigrate-and-colonize invaders shown in the base game. Eg: the 13 colonies of America were hardly all male!

(The fact that conquistadors feature so frequently in the artwork is a disconnect between the game design and the art direction. Strangling Firevine's art - which has a farmer being flung through the air - is, broadly speaking, more accurate.  Explorers represent not just pith-helmet types and military forces but any homesteader bold enough to seek out new lands, and Towns are, well, towns. )

Initial groups venturing into the land would have mostly been male.  They would need females to maintain any further population for sure.  

Mmm, but those initial groups were all during the 5 years of initial Invader contact that predates the start of the game. Blight didn't show up until the farming started.

During game, Explorers are as likely as not to be homesteaders feeling the potential is greater if they set up shop somewhere less populated. (Which might be an entirely new land, or different portions of an existing land - why Explore affects lands with Invaders.)

I have to laugh when we're arguing historical accuracy in a game where a magical spirit can wash entire cities into the ocean.

If you can get behind magic you can surely get behind the occasional non-male settler.

People care about accuracy in lore for SotM as well when it's all contained within the minds of two people.  There are lots of fandoms where magic and supernatural stuff is involved where pope care about accuracy even if it might seem silly.  Overall, I don't care whether it's male or female but based on the game description about the timeframe and artwork we have the impression I would have is that primarily human males from European countries  are the main antagonists in this game.   Based on what Eric has commented on that was a disconnect on the artwork as it was supposed to show more females from the invader side.  

That disconnect is prevalent.

Most people I ran demos for connected invaders to soldiers and blight to pollution, so I made sure I included things like diverting the river to irrigate crops, fencing off land for domestic animals, introducing foreign flora and fauna, or digging out rocks to use for foundations, streets and buildongs as things that would anger spirits and cause blight.

The threat to natives and the land from early, mostly male, invasions were looting and slave plantations.  Once settlers came (which were families, and often communities, because one person can't start a farm) the risks of disease, war, land land loss became the big threats, and those are the main threats of Spirit Island.

Yeah, that certainly makes more sense overall.  I often forget that the an entire round is meant to represent a year or longer in time not days, weeks, or months.  

Yeah, I always make sure that when I talk about blight I mention it's terrible and horrible and it wrecks all our stuff because they are destroying the land, then I lean over and stage whisper "They're farming". It generally gets a laugh and I think helps cement that this game clearly has a perspective and the invaders see this whole situation vastly differently than we do.

I'm not just talking about Spirit Island - I've seen so many examples of people complaining about a fighty female character in one game or another, arguing about how women can't fight with swords or how it's unrealistic for a woman to be a blacksmith or wear pants or whatever, but ignoring the fact that the game also features dragons, or goblins, or talking armadillos or sentient lettuce or impolite Canadians* and is therefore not exactly historically accurate in general. You don't get to complain about females being competent in a game that has dragons - it's not silly, it's offensive, because you're saying that a competent female is less likely than a fire-breathing monster that doesn't even exist in the real world.

I'd be interested to see what part of the description of SI says "male" to you, because I'm not getting that at all myself. Card art? Perhaps. I haven't really paid much attention to it, and I remember the arguments about the genders of invaders came way before anyone saw all the art.

• I may have made up a couple of these examples for comedic effect.

You don't get to complain about females being competent in a game that has dragons - it's not silly, it's offensive, because you're saying that a competent female is less likely than a fire-breathing monster that doesn't even exist in the real world.

There are some issues with that argument.  Literature generally follows the convention of Like Reality Unless Noted as part of the Law of Conservation of Detail.  Creators don't have the space to fill in every piece of information, so the gaps in the world building are filled by the assumption that anything not mentioned is identical to real life, or a change that derives from the inital noted change.  So it's totally fine to have a world with both dragons and goblins - but creating a world with dragons does not necessarily imply the existence of goblins, so if the author wants to use both then both need to be revealed while the world is still being established in the readers' minds or create an expectation that there are parts of the worldbuilding that haven't been explicitly mentioned, but might include goblins (e.g. A world which has been established to have "humans, elves, gnomes, and more" can later include goblins as part of the "and more").

This is still true in otherworld fantasies where the cultures are not based in fact and the creators have free reign to create whatever they want.  They still use cultures that are analogous to Earth cultures to decrease descriptive strain, and they therefore have to establish a baseline for how much those cultures differ from their templates, and story-relevant differences must be specifically noted.

The bottom line is internal consistency.  A created world that has magic in it still has rules, it's just that those rules are different from the rules of regular reality, so the creator has to define what those rules are.

Now, none of this applies to arguments about fighty women, because women being blacksmiths and going to war and generally doing hard labor is already part of this world and falls under the category of "things that readers should be assuming in the first place."  The fact that they don't falls under a different trope, Reality is Unrealistic

Speaking from experience, it's less about people thinking women can't be competent, it's that stuff like being a blacksmith that creates weapons/armor or swordfighting or invaders is violent and everyone including people against sexism has a hard time with the idea that it is possible for women to be violent and cruel and destructive.

(My experience being that I am a woman who got frequently physically assaulted as a kid by bullies who were other women, but everyone acts like I'm a weird alien being when I try to talk about it or otherwise espouses the general narrative that women are inherently peaceful and non-violent and it's only men who perpetrate violence.)

One of the underlying themes of Spirit Island is that of viewing the world from the perspective of the Spirits, not the invaders, and how the spirits view the world in a very different way. I would not be surprised if most spirits didn't even have a notion of the concept of genders. *We* might see it in some pieces of art, because the art depicts humans and humans tend to have a recognizable gender. But by and large, gender isn't a thing a Spirit would notice, and because the players are supposed to be thinking like spirits, it's not something the game is calling attention to. The explorers look very gender neutral to me, for example.

You can see an analogous instance of this type of thinking in the graphic design for Dungeon Lords, by the way. It's another trope reversal game where you play the "Evil" Dungeon Lord trying to fend off the hordes of adventurers who are attacking your dungeon and trashing the place. For this game, all the monter tiles are very lovingly and delightfully illustrated. But the adventurers? Kind of bland and featureless. You can generally tell which wizard is more powerful than the others, but they don't have any personality or character to them. And that's by intent, because of the player perspective the game is trying to generate.

Oh, that's awesome. I usually mention that they are farming, but not in nearly as dramatic a way.

(I feel like there probably are usually battles going on when the Dahan get affected.)

Considering that there's a reasonable chance that they're utilizing slash-and-burn farming techniques...

Different Spirits would have different blight as well.  Diverting part of the river for irrigation or water power would be blight to River Surges in Sunlight, clearing weeds and preparing a field to farm (removing the big rocks and likely fencing it off) would upset Spread of Rampant Green, Vital Strength of the Earth and Sharp Fangs Behind the Leaves.  Loss of trees would upset Keeper of the Forbidden Wilds, Sharp Fangs and Shadows Flicker like Flames.  While making coastland safe for docks would actually make it harder for Ocean's Hungry Grasp to reach inland.

There are some issues with this exception.

First, it replies to someone saying "this is offensive, here's an illustration of why" - which is about how something comes across - with an argument about why a writer might practically do such a thing. It's a hair's-breadth away from saying "your perception of what offends you is wrong or irrelevant"(†).

Second,  even in a novel that (a) is historical and (b) is concerned more with "womens' place in society" than the competence of individuals,  any  text including dragons has such a huge "not-like-reality" budget that not spending the pittance required to make womens' status slightly different than a historical norm is a choice on the part of the writer, not something they were forced into by necessity.

This isn't to say there's no place for historically - or ahistorically - sexist societies in literature, but doing so is a choice on the writer's part, and it should be done thoughtfully, not out of laziness. It seems fine to me when Harry Turtledove portrays gender roles from a particular culture accurately in one of his alt-histories; or when a fantasy writer posits a kingdom rife with sexism and prejudice when it's clear that it's that kingdom, not some sort of universal norm, and the text doesn't explicitly or implicitly portray those views as normal / acceptable.

(†) = There totally needs to be room in society for saying "OK, you see that as offensive / inappropriate, but I don't agree" - but I find that pure intellectual dissection tends to be the wrong tool for that job, unless there's up-front buy-in from both parties. Among other things, it leaves empathy out in the cold.

Oh, yes.

(The Dahan did, too, when they first arrived.)

You make an excellent point. That was not my intent. Especially as I agree that the specified offensive item is offensive, and merely disagree on why it is offensive.

And doubly agree on the difference between assuming an offensive culture and exploring an offensive culture.

These are great points.

I don’t think I have much to add to the gender discussion, but I’m reading with interest. Keep it up!

We’re just starting to teach people Sprit Island, and I described Blight as “unsustainable farming practices and kids graffiti-ing National Parks and so on.”

Yeah, in my demos at Gen Con, I described it as farming, clear-cutting, and mining, but slash-and-burn farming clearing definitely sounds appropriate. 

<nod> All of those are right / reasonable / plausible!

(It also depends on the Adversary - different ones are after different things.)

I don't want to take away from all the great responses here, but my heart went aflutter at Eric's dagger footnote. 

If you have driven off a road by taking a hard right, you do not get back on the road by pointing your steering wheel straight.

I love this quote. Is this original? I tried to google it, and couldn't find any other references to it.

Me too, it says exactly what I wanted to say but much better than I could possibly say it.

I am totally stealing this quote.

So far as I know it's original! (There's always that small chance I thought of the metaphor because I once heard it elsewhere and forgot about it or something.)

The metaphor does presume a certain  amount of directionality / momentum / persistence in the domain being discussed. In some areas, this is more obvious - eg, if you're talking about honoring women + men equally via a city's monuments, which currently number 100 men and 0 women, it's a matter of simple math to show that adding 5 men + 5 women each year will never actually reach parity.

But in other areas, it's something that might be challenged, particularly with social dynamics rather than physical icons - eg, some folks don't see how poverty or societal disadvantage due to race self-perpetuate, and if they don't see that, the metaphor may strike them as wrong.  Or maybe not! But it's good to be aware of the metaphor's assumptions when using it.

If you have driven off a road by taking a hard right, you do not get back on the road by pointing your steering wheel straight.

Honestly, it doesn't make sense to me. If the goal is for different groups of people (race, gender, religion, etc.) to be represented more evenly in games, then I think we should start representing them more evenly. How do we know how far right we've drifted? How do we know how far left we need to go? It think trying to correct the problem by overcompensating the other way just opens another can of worms.

For example, it bothers me when in a rule book or RPG book it refers to the player/GM/DM as “she”. It also bothers me when it refers to the player/GM/DM as “he”. Why not just use “they” and be done with it?

But hey, my degree is in Computer Science, so I know very little on this subject.

My own weird relationship with the idea of representation is that I have a lot of personal traits that are coded masculine by society and especially in fiction, so often even if a work is swimming in female characters I'm still going to feel represented by the male character they gave all of my actual personal traits to.

The key, in my opinion, is that equal representation is not the goal here. The goal is to deprogram our culture of several thousand years of toxic attitudes and stereotypes. Equal representation is both a tool to achieve this goal and a partial metric for how well we are doing, but it’s just a part of a larger issue.

This is 100% the way to write rulebooks! Of course it's still tricky to make sure it's clear who your pronouns are referring to, but that's part of the general issue that rulebook-writing is hard.

For anyone who's interseted (or at least, anyone who has access to the IPlayer - maybe just people in the UK), there was a really interesting programme on a week or so ago which looked at gender and the way children view it based on the way that adults (subconsciously or otherwise) have led them to think. It was a two-parter (I think each part lasted about an hour) and was called "No More Boys and Girls". They did an experiment with a class of Year 3 (aged seven) children, looking at how they viewed themselves and each other with regard to being male or female, and then worked to try and teach them to view things in a more gender-neutral way. I think stuff usually stays on the IPlayer for about a month so you should still be able to check it out for a while. I found it really interesting 'cause I'm into psychology and all that.

Yeah, unfortunately BBC's IPlayer is UK-only. 

We (in Indiana, USA) used to have a VPN that allowed us to get to it, but they started blocking VPNs a couple years ago, killing our access. 

Feel free to pay the licence fee that lets the BBC make the programs they do, and that we need to pay to access the iPlayer!

I didn't know you could do that!   Will definitely have to look into that… 

Eric’s metaphor still works even if the goal is equal representation. The problem comes from the fact that you already have a bunch of examples of unequal representation, and adding new items that do represent equally doesn’t get rid of the already-existing unequal ones. I would say that the key is actually that the goal isn’t just to make sure there is equal representation in games produced going forward, but to work towards a total body of games that has equal representation.

There's gotta be more to it than just this, though.

Because for instance, I grew up in super-liberal, super-social-equality Western Mass, and yet I'm still the only lady geek I know offline. When I was younger I often got mocked by the other girls for liking "stuff only weird gross boys like". Even around friendly girls I was still treated as a hopeless dweeb who needed to be taught proper girly stuff like makeup & fashion, in my gal pal's bedrooms generally full of teenybopper magazines and posters. Nowadays other women act amazed that I'm a "woman who knows computers", comment that they're personally hopeless with tech, and act like I'm a genius for being able to do things like download and install Android apps.

It's not discouragement that did this, because it didn't exist. My father is the one who initially taught me to be a geek in the first place. (My mother, meanwhile, can barely operate a cordless phone properly.) The teachers & other authority folk always talked about how "girls can do anything" and otherwise never were anything other than encouraging towards the idea that your gender didn't matter. Whenever I wanted to hang out with guys and do whatever they were doing they were always like "sure whatever go for it", and often were even glad I was a "girl who likes geek stuff". When I was the only girl working in a software/video game store because I was the only woman who applied (!), the male employees and customers treated me like it was 100% normal for me to be there, while it was the female customers who were surprised and astonished.

There's a lot of other things in general where I have problems and personality traits that seem to only be talked about as being experienced by men, or only show up in men I meet or male fictional characters. I've also spent a lot of time online being misgendered both accidentally and maliciously. I occasionally half-joke that I feel like I'm really a transman except I'm the only one who didn't get the memo on that being the case.

There's gotta be something there that the folks in my area all listened to the exact same socially equal and supportive messages I did growing up, and the guys all got the memo that girls should be allowed to do anything, and yet I'm still the only girl I know offline that didn't turn out ultra-girly AND the other girls frequently tried to police me into joining them in being ultra-girly both in friendly and unfriendly ways.

Even online this often crops up. Even in fandoms where I've never seen the men be anything other than friendly to women or even actively express and promote progressive ideas, I'm still often one of the very few ladies or the fandoms segregate themselves by gender and I'm one of the few women who hangs out in the "male" side of the fandom too.

So I don't think it's as easy as "just give more gender-neutral messages and be more supportive to women who want to be in male spaces" because even in places where that already happens, women still heavily cling of their own volition to feminine pursuits and women spaces. There's something else we're missing.

I mean I will say getting everyone everywhere to be more encouraging about equality will certainly help pick up more of the already-masculine-inclined women like me, to be sure, since I almost certainly would have been pushed off from my geeky or other "guy" pursuits had the guys gender policed me as much as the other girls did. But I don't think that alone will make any real inroads in women in general.

If the goal is for different groups of people (race, gender, religion, etc.) to be represented more evenly in games, then I think we should start representing them more evenly. How do we know how far right we've drifted? How do we know how far left we need to go? It think trying to correct the problem by overcompensating the other way just opens another can of worms.

At the risk of getting into dicey political areas (other mods, feel free to delete or edit this) I think "how far right we've drifted" when it comes to representation in games is extremely easy to measure. Open up basically any game, and count the relative number of women and men represented.

I feel glad I'm an adventure game and RPG fan, since life's always been pretty good there. Especially growing up with Sierra Entertainment which had a lot of ladies doing the creating as well.

It’s true that gender representation in board games is easier to measure than most other media because of the prevalence of characters with very little defining them which can therefore be cast as any gender with no other effects. But it’s also measured in the art direction for the game and the verbiage of the rulebook.

(By art direction I mostly mean things like how scantily clad the female characters are. But it also means things like the fact that Thunderspeaker, who appears as different genders on different cards is seen as female because its primary art shows a female body. I’m not sure where that stands as far as measuring gender equality goes, but it’s definitely part of the equation. )

Since having kids, I've become extremely aware of just how many very-low-level messages about gender they're being  constantly  bombarded by from their first year of life.

Eg: Kids' books - not all kids' books, but on average - seem to skew towards showing certain types of activities enjoyed by boys, and others more by girls. (Assuming they show girls at all - again, many do, but on average the # seems lower.) The longer ago the book was printed, the more pronounced/likely this effect is, so if you've gotten hand-me-down books from parents or friends with older/grown kids, that makes it more pronounced.

Eg: Kids' clothing - how many boy toddlers do you see wearing frills (let alone tights + skirts)? Or pink? Not "none"… but not a lot, either. People on average don't just have different standards for dress, but pay attention to clothing in different ways based on gender. (Our son routinely got called "she" at playgrounds while young simply because he liked purple.)

Eg: The words people use when complimenting kids, and what they compliment them for.

Eg: Whether people perceive a given level of noise / aggression as too much, or within normal bounds.

Eg: What sorts of toys people buy as gifts - or what they get offered in a waiting room, or when over at someone's house to play.

Eg: What pronouns people use for people of unknown gender, or "generic person".

The list goes on and on - and it all starts far younger than I think is commonly believed.

Eric R: Yeah, but... I mean, I was also that kid getting the same messages. I was in the same city, went to the same schools, watched the same Saturday Morning Cartoons. I also grew up in the 80s and 90s which was definitely a rah-rah women era in media even outside of where I live. But I still turned out differently, in a way that caught me a lot of flak as a kid and still leaves me often left out in the cold in discussions of gender dynamics that bear little to no resemblance to my own experiences.

And honestly a lot of gender studies stuff just leaves me scratching my head in confusion because I'm like "That is literally nothing at all like what me or my friends of both sexes went through or thought."

And me being curious about how everything works and why it all works the way it does always makes me wonder what is producing the massive discrepancies I keep stumbling into and occasionally breaking my leg over. I feel uncomfortable whenever I can't figure out why stuff doesn't gel.

Well, not everyone is going to follow the same pattern - as a kid I sat in my room and played with toy monsters and made them fight each other and stuff, and never owned a Barbie doll or anything like that. I never liked pink because it was "a girly colour" (which shows some gender-based influence right there) and never wanted to wear make-up or anything like that (and still don't). I would sit and watch my dad playing on the computer and would go on there myself whenever it was free (sometimes having arguments with my younger sister about whose turn it was), and look at the Bestiary section of the many Fantasy RPGs we owned just to admire the cool pictures of various monsters with big pointy teeth and stuff. But I've always had this thing where I don't like being told what to do, and I don't like doing stuff if I think it's what someone else wants, because then I'll feel like they'll think I only did it because they told me to. Some people's brains evidently just react to these kind of messages differently but they're there, however subtle, from the moment we're born.

An example from the documentary I mentioned above - some toys were laid out on the floor of a room. These toys included stuff like a doll, a pink teddy bear, a plastic robot, a rocking horse, a squishy worm/caterpillar thingy, and a toy car. Then some children only a few months old had their clothes swapped so that the girls were dressed in things like trousers and baggy shirts which tended to be coloured blue, and the boys were now wearing things like pink dresses. Then each child was given to a volunteer who was asked to play with them for a while. One volunteer was given a child they were told was called Sophie (actually a boy called Edward) and what did she do? Sat the "girl" down and started holding up things like the doll and the pink teddy and trying to encourage "her" to play with them (meanwhile Edward actually seemed more interested in poking around with the robot). So she was somewhat surprised afterwards when she was told the chlid's real name and admitted that her treatment of the child had been influenced by the way that child was dressed and their preconceived notions of what a child of that apparent sex "should" be interested in. It was the same story with the other kids and volunteers - they all tried to get their given child to play with stuff based on whether they thought the child was a girl or a boy (dolls and soft toys for the girls, cars and robots and stuff for the boys).

That's just one example, of course, but all the adults concerned were surprised when they had their thinking pointed out to them and admitted that they were treating their given child differently based solely on whether they thought said child was a girl or a boy. So adults can and do influence children's views of the world (and themselves) without realising it. The teacher at the school shown in the documentary was called out early on on the fact that he kept calling the girls things like "love", "darling", "sweet pea" and the boys things like "mate" and "fella". It all adds up.

My parents let me play with or try pretty much whatever I wanted that was in our budget. My dad was a big geek and nerd so he taught me about tech and science and had me watch scifi TV shows with him. I used to watch both Jem and GI Joe, had epic battles with my Barbie dolls and Voltron figures, I still have a picture of me wearing a boy's Nintendo sweatshirt combined with a frilly denim ruffle skirt. I remember how all the shows I watched were frequently either 60-40 or 50-50 in gender split, in an area where the teachers and so on also made sure to let girls do anything and teach in gender-neutral ways.

And yet growing up there was still that gender divide in everyone else. I became "one of the boys" not because I hated other girls but because generally the other girls treated my "boy side" as weird and gross, while the boys didn't care about my "girl side". The "sisterhood" thus ended up as a thing for other girls that it was made very clear I didn't fit into and wasn't wanted in.

So a lot of gender discussion ends up being confusingly wrong to me. The narrative is how women are all peaceful angels versus men being all oppressive and violent, and yet 100% of the physical bullying and 75% of the verbal bullying was done to me by other women, while in turn most of the people who strongly supported me were men. The claims about what men think and do bears little to no resemblance to the men I've known over the years, not to even the jerk men. The narrative is how lady geeks are gatekept and chased off by male geeks, yet again for me the mockery and policing all came from other women, while men in general have been indifferent to or even supportive of my being a geek. (I've certainly met male geeks who were jerks, of course, but they weren't jerks to me because I was a woman.) And it feels like constantly being told by other women how gross and weird my hobbies are has continued unabated, just substitute "problematic" for "gross and weird".

I don't have a problem with other women who weren't so lucky in what they dealt with from men talking about their experiences, but it upsets me that my own experiences aren't even on the radar. Especially when it feels like also bashing the men who were either supportive to me at best or jerks in totally different ways from what's talked about at worst.

There's also an element of "even though we in the sisterhood do nothing but tell you how you're doing being a woman wrong and you're weird and wrong compared to other women, we want you to unquestioningly support the sisterhood anyway" and I'm like, yeah, uhm, I don't know if I'm OK with this. Can you first stop telling me I'm Doing Being a Woman Wrong, and then we can talk about the sisterhood?

To throw yet another piece into the puzzle:

A few years ago I had a class where we went to Comic-con to do an anthropolgy study. It was a super fun class, and I decided to tackle an easy subject "Women in Comics" because I'm crazy. However, within the first few days I had to broaden my topic to "Gender in Comics", because I noticed a few things about the male side of this whole equation.

The biggest moment for me came from an old comic writer (wolf something? I think he worked on Vampirella) where he shared a story of a comic series he tried to pitch to his boss back in the 70's. The pitch was essentially an all-woman team of superheroes, fighting crime and stopping villainy and doing all the things superheroes do. His boss immediately quashed the idea, not because "women can't be heroes" or something stupid like that. It was because 70% of their readership was male, and "boys won't read something like that, but girls will read anything".

Now, of course, girls "read anything" because they weren't really given a lot of choice in the matter, but it was that first part that struck me. Most of my favorite characters in literature are women, far outweighing the men, and they are generally pretty awesome people, but when I was younger and still a fan of anime there were a lot of shows I loved that I never talked about with anyone, because to a degree I was ashamed for likeing them.

The big one I remember was "Maria watches over us" which is essentially a slice-of-life story about some girls in an all-girls catholic school. Nothing much happens, there isn't a lot of action, and it is simply how the characters interact with each other. Everything told me this was a show that as a boy, I was supposed to not like it, but man did I love those characters and how some of them were very composed and traditional and the others were goofy and silly and it was a great show.

Things have been changing slowly, but I imagine it is still the case that a boy who likes "girly things" like those sort of shows or the Bachelor or who knows what, is still going to be pretty ruthlessly mocked and derided.

Though picturing it, it would be moslty men who would mock them, and that is pretty indicative. We police our own gender, not each others, as a general rule of thumb. And I wonder if taking a more multi-faceted approach to equality in some areas would yeild better results than just focusing on one gender or the other.

Of course, striving for gender equality while another section of society is just working on blowing up the whole concept of a gender divide is kind of difficult in its own right.

A few years ago, a friend of mine was flying on the same plane as Howie Mandel, when he was doing the show "Deal or No Deal". She asked him why were there always women on the show, why can't it sometimes be men? Howie gave her the same line. Men won't watch it if there are men on the show, but women will watch it if women are on the show.

Sometimes I wonder if this is the reason for my own oddball experiences. MA being the usually progressive place that it is, it's likely that what happened is that all the laser focus on male behavior is what produced the situation of men who are generally reasonable towards women on gender issues and women who heavily police each other. We "solved" one side of the issue but did absolutely nothing for the other side.

Though I will say I don't think we really addressed inter-gender policing for men either. I remember particularly vividly how I had a guy pal as a kid who was very short for his age (shorter than I was, even), and he got viciously teased for it. He was constantly getting in trouble because the other boys kept always goading him relentlessly until he finally would snap and took a swing at them to get them to shut up, and then they'd act all angelic so only he would get punished. (I tried several times to stick up for him by pointing out to the teachers how I was seeing all the constant teasing the kids were doing to him, but just got blown off every time.)

Yeah, the whole "let's bust the gender binary" confuses me even more in a lot of ways, as someone who is basically "non gender conforming cisperson". I want the right for everyone to do whatever they feel comfortable with and still be accepted as normal, and I'm personally a sort of even mix of masculine and feminine, but I'm also still a woman-person.

For me there are multiple issues when it comes to gender representation in games, and to be quite honest I see this as an ongoing process so what I generally ask for isn't what I eventually want the status quo to be.

It would be lovely to snap my fingers and have everything equal, with lots of different and diverse characters representing a wide variety of people. Realistically though this will only happen a little at a time - look how much pushback there is when I just ask for an explorer sculpt that isn't overwhelmingly masculine!

I'd settle right now for just more females to balance out the huge disparity that already exists, but my vision is for much more than that. I want diverse characters in every way rather than just a token black person and a token women in a chain mail bikini, and the male characters could definitely be more diverse too.

In real life, I think different people are affected by society's expectations in different ways, and I also think that despite the fact that we live in a world that is much more open and tolerant than when I was growing up, in many ways there is much more pressure to conform to gender stereotypes nowadays, especially for children.

Part of "busting the gender divide" for me is allowing everyone to be the person they are whatever gender they identify as. There's nothing wrong with being a pink and glittery princess girl if that's what you like, and there's nothing wrong with liking those things if you aren't a girl either. I just want to get rid of the idea that you have to like certain things and behave certain ways just because you happen to have been born with particular sexual organs.

And yes, these gender pressures are just as toxic for males as they are for females and no-binary people.

My own pushback was less with your desire for a feminine sculpt, and more that you framed it as "people don't see women as competent" when I think it's more "people don't see women as violent". B ecause the examples of "competence" you listed–and the invaders in this case–revolved around war and violence, and because resistance towards the idea that women can be destructively violent is strong even among progressives.

Correction: I wanted a gender neutral sculpt, not a feminine one. I was arguing that explorers would not just be male and that it was inappropriate for them to be portrayed as exclusively male, just as it would be inappropriate for them to be exclusively female - realistically you'd need both males and females to ultimately create settlements, homesteads, whatever.

I totally agree that women can be violent, there are countless real-world examples of this. The majority of violence is perpetrated by males, but that of course doesn't mean it's an exclusively male trait. I'm totally happy with the portrayal of individuals of any gender as violent (or non-violent) so I think we're on the same page here, but I do want to point out that it's very easy to disrail conversations about gender inequality by pointing out that women can be the perpetrators of violence and abuse too. (I also want to point out that I don't think you are actually doing this.)

I have totally seen examples of gamers on BGG whose problem with certain female characters in other games was definitely not that they thought women couldn't be violent, as they were perfectly happy with something like a female wizard with offensive spells. It was more that they thought women can't be good at traditionally male activities when they were willing to suspend disbelief over much more fantastical ideas.

I also don't see exploring in Spirit Island as inherently violent anyway. Eric says ravaging is basically farming, so I'm guessing that exploring is families building their individual homes/farms in a previously uncolonised place, who will later be joined by other families (building) which will eventually necessitate intensive farming, mining, etc (ravaging). I assume the damage done to Dahan during ravaging represents things like destruction of their hunting grounds, loss of important foraging areas and such, rather than directly killing them. As much as I like to describe the action of a single explorer ravaging as a bunch of people futilely thrusting their swords into the ground or shooting guns into the empty sky, invader actions don't feel like violence as much as unthinking destruction.

Yes - exactly!

I assume the damage done to Dahan during ravaging represents things like destruction of their hunting grounds, loss of important foraging areas and such, rather than directly killing them. As much as I like to describe the action of a single explorer ravaging as a bunch of people futilely thrusting their swords into the ground or shooting guns into the empty sky, invader actions don't feel like violence as much as unthinking destruction.

It's partly that sort of thing(*), but also the physical conflicts resulting from that encroachment. As soon as Invaders show up, little conflicts begin; Ravage represents it boiling over into the Invaders taking organized action. They might think of it as "making sure we're safe" / "protecting what's ours" / "reprisal for that time last year", or it might be a horrible misinterpretation of what the Dahan declaring a grievance-war with them means, but it does involve outright bloodshed.

(Though an Adversary which didn't take it that far could be interesting - where in place of the usual damage Invaders + Dahan Push each other. Probably only at lower Terror Levels, though.)

(*) =   Perhaps more 'land appropriation' than "hunting-ground destruction", as the Dahan are more agrarian/herders than hunters… though they do hunt some.

This topic is interesting to me as my 9 yr old daughter is facing the street level reality of it right now.

She is growing up in a family where her mother has a master's degree and is a manager, while her dad dropped out of college to help get her mother through grad school and is now a stay at home dad.  We were a bit crazy about making sure she wasn't pinked and dolled, we had wrestle time and caught bugs and played sports and sword fights.  Her brother had a similar push, getting dolls and pink about as much as his sister (read they both got as close to a balance of everything as we could pull off).

Cecily plays 3 sports, is the youngest girl in our schools accelerated program, and is on a great pace in science and math.

But we've already started to see changes.  She doesn't want to run for student council because a very popular girl is running and Cecily is afraid she'd win, upsetting the girl and possibly upsetting Cecily's social standing in school, which went from that weird girl to the weird girl who is our goalie so don't make fun of her.  She's more than once been sad because boys she plays basketball with at recess say she's smart, while they call other girls pretty, even ones that said she was pretty before they talked to her much.  

She ends up handling it well, but we see the changes, and trying to root through what is her becoming herself, and what is her trying to fit into a changing socio-gender world as she and her peers grow older.

These small things matter.  She is pushing against a flow of socialization that hits her stronger every time another girl or boy among her peers buys in.  When a friend of hers from soccer quits because she can be more popular by cheerleading, or a boy with no malice remarks that girls don't play basketball at recess, it pushes her to follow the flow.

We work hard to expose her to reinforcement that the girl she is is the right girl for her to be, and give her neutral space where she can do science or whatever without being special or weird.  (She really dislikes when adults tell her she's exceptional for doing what she does while being a girl)

Every single small detail that says "you are normal" is encouraging to her.  But much more than that, every small detail that says "Cecily is normal" to her peers can give her time to catch her breath as she swims against the current of socialization.  Never mind encouraging them to embrace their individual self as well.

Has anybody here read Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire?  It's a novella (technically a prequel to Every Heart a Doorway, although it can be read perfectly fine on it's own) about two twin sisters and how they learn to find themselves while trying to escape the roles their parents cast for them.

This reminds me of how in a world where oversexualization of women is the overriding discourse, it can be really hard to get across how demoralizing being desexualized can feel.

Because while being called smart can feel good, noticing that it comes in an absence of ever being called pretty can make you feel like you don't really count as a woman versus being viewed as a "guy with boobs" or genderless blob or everyone's kid/big sister.

(It also doesn't help that I grew up in the decades where sentiments like "you have a nice personality" were code for "you're so ugly you should put a bag over your head but I don't want to be rude so I have to think up something nice to say instead".)

And when you can't complain about the number of male friends you have, but you notice how as more and more years go by you're the only woman you personally know who still has no husband or boyfriend to go with said friends. (I already have my mom's family starting to stare at me pointedly as "the only cousin who's not married yet" and I just want to go "look it's not like I'm not trying…")

Ironically this is one area where gender studies narratives made it so harder for me. When I was a teenager I just assumed that well it kinda sucks being literally the only girl in my class who can't get a date to save her life but surely I can't be the only woman who struggles with that.

Then I gained knowledge of the wider gender studies discourse where apparently no I really am the only woman who can't get a date to save her life AND on top of it there's all these other allegedly "universal" woman experiences I actually never had (and also conversely experiences I had that apparently no other woman has had) and that's when I really started having gender identity issues and feeling crappy about my being non-gender-conforming.

I don't think I really got over being unattractive until I realised that most of the physical attractiveness I envied in other people was an accident of genetics which they had no control over at all. (Sure, you can improve the way you look with hair and clothes and makeup and such, but if you start out ugly you're never going to be really beautiful.) I didn't choose my level of attractiveness so I don't need to be ashamed, and my gorgeous friends don't get to be proud of their good fortune genetically either.

But we put so much value on physical attractiveness as a society that I can never actually tell anyone I know I'm unattractive without them falling over themselves to reassure me that I'm actually beautiful (and trust me, I'm not). Most people actually can't understand that I now genuinely don't care that I'm not. Really, I'm over it. Beauty is nice, but it's absolutely not everything, and I would a hundred times rather be complimented on my personality because I've worked hard to be this awesome.

 At the risk of derailing this thread further, I'll note that being attractive is 70% confidence, 20% presentation (eg. how you dress), and 10% raw physical looks. The last one isn't that important, and even that one you have *some* control over through exercise.

Unfortunately until I stop getting told variants on "you're a nice girl but I just don't like you that way" all the time I'm not going to have the luxury of seeing "you have a nice personality" as a legitimate compliment as opposed to a polite putdown of my looks (or whatever else it is about me that makes me be desexualized).

I mean, it's easy to say "beauty isn't everything" when a lack of beauty isn't preventing you from getting some of the things in life that you want. I don't so much envy beautiful women for their beauty as I envy them the experience of being desired and loved that beauty nets them that I don't get to have.

It's a bit like a rich person who never has to worry about being homeless or starving saying "money isn't everything" to a poor person who can barely afford groceries or rent. (Actually, as someone who is also poor, I can say from lived experience it's EXACTLY like that.)

And sorry for derailing things, :X, it's just so hard to read gender studies stuff when so many of the axioms used during the discourses are based on only a narrow subset of people with a narrow subset of life experiences without it ever being disclaimed anywhere that that's the case.

So it's hard not ending up as the person who has to go "well, actually" all the time because I'm often stuck having to be the designated representative of all those other people and experiences the gender studies people haven't taken into consideration yet.

When I was at school I filled the role of "that weird kid that no-one wants to grup with or talk to for some unspoken/unknown reason". I never dressed the same way as anyone else or wore the same kind of clothes as them (note that I went to an all-girls secondary school and even though the Sixth Form was mixed, there were very few boys so I never really spoke to any after Junior School). Eventually the most dreaded term a teacher could use when giving us work to do was "group work", which for me meant "sit there while everyone else gets themselves into groups, then get put into one of those groups by the teacher because I don't have one and then sit there bored while everyone else talks amongst themselves and completely ignores me".

I ended up coming to the conclusion that if people are gonna judge me by my appearance and decide not to have anything to do with me just because I don't wear short skirts (or, indeed any kind of skirt or dress) or whatever, then they're just proving to me that they're so shallow as to be not worth bothering with. The whole "trying to attract someone's attention in order to engage in intimate physical activities" issue is moot for me since I've never been interested in that so it's not something I've ever tried to do or would have any clue about anyway.

So yeah...the whole thing where people chagne their appearance in order to attract the attention of other people has never really made sense to me - why would you want to encourage someone to judge you purely on your appearance? Wouldn't you rather just talk to them and stuff and find out about each other that way? This is getting somewhat away from the gender subject now, though, so maybe we should try to veer back onto the original subject of the thread somehow :D.

Basically it's because for a lot of things in life even beyond dating, it ends up being a choice between "worry about the things required to get a thing you want or need, or be miserable trying to get by without the thing you want or need".

I would be totally happy if I could get to have someone be attracted to me via doing nothing but being myself and talking to people and connecting to them emotionally, but since that empirically doesn't work, then I don't have much of a choice but to consider having to just learn to put in a bunch of fuss about gaining the things required to be seen as attractive.

I find having to figure out how to do things like grow out and style my hair and put on makeup to be a pain, but I find not having a love life to also be a pain, so it's a question you have to ask yourself.

And as was alluded to earlier in phantaskippy's stories about his daughter, this can lead to even more onerous decisions like having to choose "Do I want to be a smart girl in STEM or do I want to get to have a love life, since smart girls are often desexualized and otherwise viewed as unattractive?"

A similar dynamic shows up in how in order to find a job people are forced to do a boatload of "Playing the Finding Work Game" actions even when knowing how to do those actions will have no relevance whatsoever while working the actual job you're trying to get.

So you end up with similar failure dynamics there, too. Playing the "Dating Game" penalizes people who are bad at improving their looks and performing as their gender correctly, and playing the "Finding Work Game" penalizes people who are bad at social skills or don't have the resources for things like building networks and having internships and diplomas. Even when someone would otherwise make a great boyfriend or girlfriend or even when someone would otherwise be a great worker.

One of the things that bothers me the most about me personally, excepting my general lack of self-esteem, is that I have met many amazing women who are funny and smart and generally great people, that I am absolutely not physically attracted to.

I know it is essentially brainwashing, that the images in my head are products put there by a variety of marketing and ad agencies that were pushing an agenda that I want no part of, but... I can't unflip that switch. I can't choose to be attracted to women who should deserve it (that's a weird sentence and sentiment isn't it? I hope my intent is clearer than the language I'm using). It sickens me at times, because it is wrong to how I want to view the world and how I want to be, but I can't seem to change it.

Maybe it will get better as I get older, I'm pretty young still, but it is something that eats away at me at certain times when I realize that there is an awesome person I'm talking to, and I wonder about how they look instead of the fun we're having talking about DnD or Fantasy Tropes or TV shows.

I have the exact opposite thing: I'm only attracted to people once I get to know them really well and feel really compatible with them. So I ended up with a lot of friends I fell in love with (which of course didn't work out) and trying to figure out flirting and our "physical attraction first" dating culture is still a thing of pure puzzlement.

I remember for the longest time as a teen I was pretty sure I was ace or gay, because of stuff like how the other girls would be gushing over the latest popular guy to gush over and I'd just be uncertainly like "Uh... I mean, I guess I can see how he's kinda cute?" and the other girls would look at me like I was bonkers.

We can't help what we're attracted to and we shouldn't feel ashamed about it.

I definitely think the media has an influence (particularly on what straight men feel like they are "allowed" to find attractive in women) but a lot of what's traditionally physically attractive has a basis in biology that's hardwired. (Obviously many people have preferences for traits that aren't the "ideal", but the "ideal" is fairly universal across cultures.)

And yeah, it's helpful in many way to be beautiful and to have "ideal" physical characteristics, and it gives you loads of advantages that us uglier types just don't have, and not just in the "finding a partner" part of life. It sucks, but there it is. But there are other traits that will make up for lack of conventional beauty in non-romantic life at least, as long as you're not dealing with someone who's shallower than a kid's paddling pool when all the water's been splashed out.

We all find different things attractive and those things aren't always physical. Sometimes people find certain physical traits attractive that are kind of the opposite of what society says they should like - a female friend of mine has a huge thing for short men, for example, and another friend prefers women that are overweight, and I know a ton of people who are a long way from being conventionally attractive who have romantic and sexual relationships.

Sometimes that "spark" happens with someone who doesn't fit your preferences very well. Sometimes someone is perfect on paper but you just aren't attracted to them for some reason.

Life would be a lot easier if we could choose who we are attracted to, wouldn't it? I mean it would make the life of paedophiles much easier because they could just start fancying adult people instead. Gay people in communities where homosexuality is illegal could just become straight. You could just fill in a questionnaire and get paired with someone compatible and flip the attraction switch and boom! Instant relationship.

Attraction just isn't that simple.

This talk of physical attractiveness reminds me of how confused I was as a young'un. There were these people held up as models of physical beauty, that everyone was supposed to fall in love with on sight. I think I thought there was something wrong with me because I didn't.

I still find standards of physicala beauty, as expressed in, eg, advertisements, pretty blah for me. These women that advertisers seem to think I will find attractive just don't do much for me.

(I'm a gay male, but I do still find women attractive sometimes. Just not those women, or at least not the way they're presented.)

Of course this is all about first impressions, and the attraction that comes with getting to know someone can be much more.

Edit: Eh, forget it. I was ranting again.

Basically this is yet another case where the gender studies explanation just doesn't actually match up to or explain observed reality. In this specific case: Still not explaining why most people actually find it really simple and easy to attract hookups and dates while only a minority of people find it hard to attract people. Also still not explaining what people in the latter category are supposed to do to ever get to have the same level of success as the former category.

In my case, I tend to chalk it up to social ineptitude rather than my physical appearance.

Then again, the two are not entirely separable, since some factors of appearance (such as eye contact and fashion sense) are dependent on behavior more than innate physical attractiveness.

Jeysie, perhaps you'd be interested in reading authors that critique the idea of a "shared female experience"? There are some pretty sharp criticisms of that trend from the point of view of intersectionality, people with multiple overlapping non-mainstream identities. The idea that all women have to fight off men attracted to them is pretty strange if you're in a wheel chair, for instance. My understanding is that one of the central parts of "third-wave feminism" is challenging a universal definition of women.

The article The Myth of Shared Womanhood and How It Perpetuates Inequality by Mia Mackenzie is pretty well-known, but unfortunately no longer available in full.

I'm also going to look for sources on the oppression of women by women, which seemed to be another central concern of yours.

That article's bylines reminds me of how the idea of a shared female experience has also sometimes been used against transwomen to argue they're not really women.

But yeah I think a lot of why I tend to identify more as a nerd than I do as a woman is because I actually have a lot more shared experiences to fellow nerds than I do other women.

I’m finding this thread fascinating, as a trans person I’ve thought rather a lot about gender and I find stuff like the above interesting. All the gender pressures of our society suck so much…

The oppression of women by women is also something which infuriates me. I had a lot of similar experiences to Jeysie at my wonderfully fun all girls school!

This is exactly how I feel too… I’m also mostly ace, though, and just don’t get the whole super powerful sexual attraction idea…

Yeah, like I said earlier, my own thing regards physical attraction is weird.

If I look back at everyone I've ever had a romantic interest in, they all have a ton of similarities in personality, but almost no commonalities in looks. Not even all the same gender; I don't crush on girls often in part because for whatever reason it's more likely for me to meet guys who fit my personality preferences, but it's happened.

I have some physical preferences--mostly a fondness for red hair and people who wear glasses--but they're not required for me to like someone.

So this can end up in weird situations where I can recognize that someone's attractive aesthetically but I don't necessarily have any romantic interest in them based on that alone. Or when I've had crushes where the reaction of my gal pals was essentially a confused but polite "OK, you do you I guess".

So... I guess the funny thing is that Silverleaf's "You could just fill in a questionnaire and get paired with someone compatible and flip the attraction switch and boom! Instant relationship" is actually essentially a perfect description of how my attraction tends to literally work (which just makes it that much more frustrating when the other person doesn't feel the same way).

Cheerleading and student council for 9-year-olds? Wow.

My daughter is 7.5, and is getting some of the opposite attitudes - she's smart, and her best friends are boys. Enough so that she has drama happening with a couple of the other 2nd-grade girls (and has more or less since kindergarten). How much of that is fueled by her mother's and my divorce is an open question.

I tried the full-time dad thing, and found it incredibly isolating. You've got my respect.

Isolating, yeah.  But I do well with that.  And let me tell you, hormones hit hard, and it hits your daughter and her friends and boys and the universe changes over the summer.  At least ours did.  I'm a child of divorce myself with a sister who was 7 when it happened, and I can tell you the road coming up isn't easy.  Just be honest, my dad for some reason thought my sister and I were unaware of reality, like we didn't live through the process too.

My wife hates the dad among moms stigma, but I understand it, even if it did suck that my daughter had a harder time getting social engagement with her peers.

To get back towards the original thread discussion, representation can be a huge positive in helping young people see themselves as valuable by showing success, coolness, and other enviable traits in people that don't fit the normally published imagery.  Breaking those easy tropes is meaningful, even in small ways.  Too many times "I don't look like that" gets tied to "so I can't do X".  The pressure to fit a mold hits hard, even when we break the more standard norms, we often find ourselves pushed to fit a different norm to belong.  I think one of the reasons people love Tachyon is she is just herself.  She's a scientist superhero with a spouse, and who that spouse is matters as much to her character as Legacy's spouse.  It feels real, instead of feeling like a defining trait that she is built around.

I kind of go back to how I don't really understand "representation" because my identity doesn't revolve around the usual demographics people care about, but my actual personality traits. I tend to identify as things where you become or are those things because of your personality, rather than the reverse where we tend to assign "package deals" of personality traits to identity demographics that almost never fit me.

I have a much easier time identifying with, say, a straight male nerd character than I do a bi lady character who's otherwise nothing like me. So if you're getting rid of the former (or any other male character with traits I can relate to) for more of the latter in the name of diversity, then you're not actually making the cast in a work more relatable to me.

I think women get used to relating to male characters for a couple of reasons - often we have no female characters at all or just the one token female so we have no choice but to identify with the males, and also there's more diversity in the male characters so you're more likely to find one like you in some way than you are with the cookie-cutter female(s).

I mean there's not anywhere near enough diversity in male characters, and it's even more egregious with females. We don't see enough skinny, short, fat, or non-muscley men, and we don't see enough women of any shape other than the traditional "boobs on a stick" model. Where are the fat women? The skinny athletic women (think long-distance runners or high jumpers)? The muscled women (from bodybuilders to less-defined-but-massively-strong hammer throwers)? Where are the people of all genders with visible disabilities?

Non-binary? There's nothing for you at all, move along. :(

I'm a fat woman-shaped person myself (and even if I wasn't fat I still have a broad build with wide shoulders and rib cage and muscular legs) and I'm pretty sure I've never been able to play a character in a board game that is shaped anything like me and isn't obviously a joke character (because looking like this is terribly amusing, apparently). And even though I'm perfectly happy with the body I have, it can be really tedious to open up yet another box to find the inevitable message that people like me aren't even worthy of being depicted in game art. I can't even imagine what that feels like for a person who is insecure about the way they look.

And it's not even like I'm at some extreme that would be unreasonable to expect to see very often (or at all) in game art. If I had full-body tattoos to look like a lizard I wouldn't mind if I didn't see a lizard-tattooed person in every game, but I don't! I'm just a regular-looking person like you can see every day walking down the street.

And I haven't even started on non-physical characteristics... *eyeroll*

I remember because of this I was fascinated by a somewhat recent character where there was a skinny (as in legit scrawny) male character who accidentally gained powers that among other things gave him a measure of energy-based durability and strength… and stayed just as skinny in his body shape afterwards. It was a nice touch.

As someone who's been perpetually overweight, giant feet, fuzzy for a woman, giant nose, equally giant eyebrows, and a wide face, I remember having a debate once with someone who tried explaining one way I had white privilege was that there were no shortage of women who looked like me, and I pointed out that the only women who look like me in the media are the ones you see in "before" pictures. Maybe we get to be the plucky best friend of the beautiful, popular main character woman having all the actual cool adventures if we're really lucky.

I only wish I could be the typical petite, thin, blonde-and-blue-eyed, tiny nosed "white woman" we see on TV all the time. I'd give just about anything to be pretty at this point; being smart only matters for anything if you're lucky enough to be smart enough to be a Silicon Valley wunderkind or otherwise super talented.

And really in general, if you're pretty everyone loves you, if you're not pretty you basically have to be the World's Most Amazing Person to make up for it.

I don't know, this is why I've always been cold on identity politics in general. People aren't tidy little package deals based on broad things like their skin or sex. We should focus on individual problems or commonalities in life experiences. Imagine how much we could get done helping people if we stopped spending so much time telling people who have the same problems that they're actually alien from each other.