It seems to me that this is exactly what they've done, and you're the one that's not being tolerant of their vision.

There was defiantly an interview where he talked about Nord society, and how sixist/racist it was, Youtube is being slow, it might take a while to find it.

There were references to a couple of Nord women Morrowind sent you to. One of them said not to mess with this one Nord woman because she could tear your head off. It made me kind of scared to do the quest the first time. I have never seen any references to any women in this game by any race where they said they were weak or incapable. These games have never avoided putting women in places of power or capability and the game has never made a big deal out of it, as in this is the way it has always been. Never once did I hear a reference or a remark to the effect "We have women rulers now, what will we do?"

I'm not really bothered along as it's lore accurate, but if you look at Oblivion I don't think there was a single generic female solider - and Skyrim has hardly been painted as a land of equality and fairness relative to the Imperial province.

There were certainly no Female City Guards in Oblivion, that's for sure. There was a mod to fix that somewhere, though.

Only "racist" I've seen was that moron you see when you first enter the city, who you can beat into submission and 100g.
Ulfric is hardly racist, he is just xenophobic which is common for uneducated, lived-indoors-my-whole-life folks.

Racism is active opposition of other races based on pseudoscientific "facts" that the others are inferior in some way. If you just don't like "grayskins", you are a xenophobe who is just an idiot who doesn't give his ideals much thought.
As the saying goes, "I'm not a racist, I just hate [n-word]"

I have always believed that it's Nord culture based rather than Bethesda purposely bring modern civilized behaviors into skyrim to appease the liberal minded decent people.

Mjoll the Lioness, Jenassa etc etc & various other female warriors are actively involved with hitting things with swords & i've always assumed that the female guards would be capable of this as well & feel that their shared gate responsibilities fit in.

Then again, I prefer looking at the female guards while "accidentally" typing "removeallitems" in console;)

... After reading more of the replies, should the real question be about the surprising prevalence of sixism is video game players?

To the OP: One of the reason why Beth included female soldiers is because of two reason. First, is because of the Nord culture of having strong women warrior and whatnot. Secondly, and most importantly I think, was because of the modders adding female soldiers to the game. The female soldier mods are very popular. Morrowind didn't have female imperial guards but there was a mod to change that. Oblivion was the same. Beth just got the cue and carry on with the implementation.

Generic guards were all the same but there were quite a few named ones:
-Caelia Draconis as captain of the Leyawiin guards
-Viera Lerus as the captain of the Bravil City Watch.
-Maelona as a member of the Anvil guards.
-Tierra as a Kvatch guard

Then of couse you got the countesses Arriana Valga and Millona Umbranox and Vilena Donton as Master of the Fighter's Guild. I can't see that much of a difference to Skyrim tbh. Strong women in TES have nothing to do with political correctness. It's just how the universe works.

This is btw coming from someone who hates political over-correctness.

It seems to me that you're saying that because Bethesda made Skyrim in a way that does not conform to your particular socio-political values, there is some sort of PC-based cencorship at work. Has it crossed your mind that perhaps Bethesda included lots of strong females in Skyrim not because they felt some sort of pressure to do so but because they, uh, wanted to do it that way?

If most women were forced to play 'reality' than their range of characters would be limited to mage and stealth archer. That's not exactly a wide range for a fantasy RPG. So, we have equality of outcome.

It's a part of the genre. I don't mind it. It's silly at times- but in general we are playing characters that throw fire through their hands so what's real about that? I do think it crazy that acrobatics was dropped because that was just 'crazy', but mobs of female melee characters are perfectly sane. Perhaps on Nirn the women and men are exactly equal with their musculature and strength.

That was an over-site from the devs more than a nod to Lore. Back in Morrowind, there were female Ordinators. Now, as a group, you can not find a more insular, conservative, reactionary group than Ordinators. They would put a game long bounty on your head if you even tried on some of their armor and if you did not believe as them, they would have nothing to do with you.

I partially agree with the OP. I really dislike political correctness since it is based on fear and insecurity. Creating a story with dislikeable characters does not mean that the storyteller is a dislikeable person in real life. I like a game world that is not perfect and totally egalitarian because a more dystopic game world gives me a bigger challenge to change things and a reason to fight the good fight. Considering the nord women, I think it fits the lore that they are storng and more equal than than the other tamrielite women (for some reason the TES nords remind me more of klingons than vikings). Neither should one forget that the traditional orcish women live under polygyny and are pretty much owned by their chief. At the end of the day, Oblivion feels much more of a overly pc game than Skyrim is.

Exactly.
Im a highly moral person and you should see the short stories I write.
I like writing things that dont end well, that leave a bad taste in the mouth. The kind of story that people mull over internally for days going 'I wish that ended/ happened differently'

Take for example dikeens, a great socialist and humanist.
His stories are full of disagreeable people and events.

The point is that in creating a disliked event or person you are holding up a mirror to the reader, hopefully giving them insight in themselves, their society and what could use a spruce-up in those.

I am also sick of 'tv show morality', very black and white, good versus evil.
The 'good guys' are as one dimensional as the 'bad guys' and the moral usually is 'obey authority and everything will work out in the end'.

So you want women back in the kitchen. Good to know, now we can disregard your desire for sixism to be reinserted back into the world just as we're crawling away from it (at least in some ways). Also, I find your desire for freedom from censorship to insert pointless hate frankly hilarious.

You know that the medievel era (that TES games are based on) was far more gender balanced than the Victorian-era retconning would ead you to believe, right? Women worked as hard as men, often ruled as much as men, and were not the dainty damsels that England managed to convince people they were.

Todd says a lot of things. It's wise to not listen half of it, and heavily suspect the rest

I don't even know what to say with this post.

Are you trying to say: because this game is played by male gamers mostly; it's shouldn't afraid of being sixist? Or any game using medieval themes should reflect sixism of that ages as well and while we can make exceptions from this "historical accordance" for dragons, mages, elves, we can't make another one for sixism?

Okay, almost every rpg with medieval theme must be sixist and female players should play male characters if they want to fight dragons. If you start the game with a female character they should assume the role of Dragon-Born's wife who stays behind and keeps the house clean while his husband saves the world... okay...

Funny that the only people who seem to get offended these days are those who are offended by political correctness...since those of us who are truly politically correct really don′t feel that offending someone is necessary, we must stop being politically correct...this is getting difficult...

Guys, the men/mer/beast folk of Tamriel probably don't give a hoot about genders. There's always some sort of war going on and excluding half the population from physical labor and war duty counts as a loss of able bodied workers and soldiers. If I was emperor leading a weakened province and about to lose a war against someone (Aldmery Dominion, Mehrunes Dagon, Dagoth Ur, whatever) I would make anyone with a pair of legs and at least one arm a soldier, regardless of gender, race or sixual orientation.

Seems like this is just people making up a "problem".

There ARE games out there that deal with sixism. It's far from unheard of. TES games have never dealt with it, however. There's no evidence that they want to wade into the issues of sixism. There's no evidence that "political correctness" forced them to change the design of their game. Past games had plenty of strong females doing all manner of things. (Evidence would require links to interviews that comments were supposedly made)

Seems more like this thread has a problem with extreme anti-political correctness, where some people think something is wrong if sixism or the like isn't prevelant in a game. That's pretty messed up.

That said, the game does deal with racism somewhat, regarding the Stormcloaks.


Off-topic, but science doesn't support this point of view at all. Specific gender roles, beyond the biologically obvious (women get pregnant, briastfeed, etc) are always shown to be enforced by a culture and upbringing rather than being necessary or part of a gender's intrinsic makeup. Studies show that women lean away from math and math-based careers not because they aren't good at math, but because even in elementry school they pickup on social cues that women aren't "supposed" to do that. I shudder at the thought of how many potentially great scientists we've lost to this as well as the loss to other fields.

I see no reason why a game should have sixism as a strong element just because YOU think it should.

I'm with this guy. It didn't even occur to me. (Just like I imagine it wasn't a big topic of discussion at Beth, no matter what the poor oppressed "why aren't the women properly oppressed?" crowd seems to be suggesting.)

Honestly, the people making a big deal about this seem to be the ones who've got an issue. if the women not being held down by the dominant males throws off your sense of "realism" and "immersion"....

It says a lot about the OP's character that he's completely incapable of imagining a society not based on sixism.

And for the record The Elder Scrolls has a huge female fanbase, they're just not here because of threads like this.

How's making up stereotypes out of nowhere playing "reality"?

If we want to talk about our history, then those roles were still almost entirely male in most cultures. Of course, our history isn't the history TES has to go with.

Indeed. As allegorical vehicles used to detail social injustices. Your point, at least the mention of dikeens, does not support the OP's argument.