If there is one thing 4e has been doing better than 2e, its gender dynamics.
... good at them might be a stretch, but you don't get stuff like the above.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
... good at them might be a stretch, but you don't get stuff like the above.
It does. Remember Gunnars who is "barely in his second century" and is ~120s?
I mean those orphans could have been Chaos worshippers, the Bloody Beast could be an upstanding member of society taking on unsavory necessities for the good of all, something Witch Hunters would be familiar with. Meanwhile, tax evasion is always pretty sus, gotta get on top of that.
Like... why seriously? It's like the people who wrote this cannot get basic worldbilding. Half the population is women, they are just as likely to express magic with all its dangers and opportunities as men. This is not something that any reasonable institution for training wizards would miss, much less one that was founded by Teclis, an elf. Unless the writer of the above segment wants to argue that Teclis is irrationally sexist this makes no sense and that is not even going into things like the Jades and Ambers being preexistence orders with no gender bias.
Codex
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The particular segment mentions that the Aethyr has no particular bias, but that it is "far more likely for a woman to be burnt at the stake than a man".
However, even if you were to account for that, the number of women at the colleges being so low that they don't even have proper accomodations? That is downright stupid.
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It's not even about sexism.
depicting a people as sexist/patriarchal can be a relevant narrative choice, a dangerous choice, but it can be done well.
but that would manifest in this case as women getting the bad rooms or the smaller dorms or not getting the top jobs as often, not 'what do we do with these thing called 'woman'?
Which makes no reasonable sense because this is not our world. In this world accusations of witchcraft were indeed deeply rooted in misogyny, for all that plenty of men died burned just the same. Malus however is a world in which magic is a recognizable external force which people hate and fear and the sight of which often drives them to kill. Under those circumstances one would expect no or far lesser gender bias in who gets killed.
You know, this brings up that point Boney made earlier re; slayers where one of the big things perpetuating slayerhood is the sacredness of ritually mimicking one of the Ancestors. Presumably, mimicking Thungni by discovering/traveling to the Glittering Realm and discovering secrets (Runelore) there would be similarly sacrosanct.
Whether or not this would be a way of edging around the whole 'must be a descendant of Thungni to be taught Runelore' by a.) not actually being taught by anyone but instead discovering/developing it ourselves and b.) arguing that 'traveling to the Glittering Realm and discovering Runes' is in and of itself keeping to the ways of the Ancestors because that's what Thungni did.
So, uh, I kinda think we wouldn't really need adoption papers, because by getting to the Glittering Realm we'd already have access to all of Runelore.
You want to break into the domain of a secretive craft god to steal his secrets? You know I made a joke about this earlier, but what on earth makes you think he would not smite Mathilde for the temerity of being there? All this being predicated on our ability to enter a realm we do not understand and know only by metaphor and legend.
Mathilde entering the Glittering realm is about on the level of difficulty of an utterly mundane human with no mage sense and no magic entering the warp and probably about as dangerous
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She can ask her greenskin smiting buddy Gazul to pass a good word for her with his nephew
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The unfortunate truth of executions for hard-to-verify causes is that they disproportionately target the vulnerable, either because existing biases make it easier to think that "those people" are monarchists/reactionaries/saboteurs, or because some people make false accusations and nobody really bothers to second-guess them when the target is someone you're predisposed to think of as less than human/untrustworthy/unpleasant.
Two points: First, Gazul was the one to discover the glittering realm and runes, Thungni just did all the cool stuff. Second, the glittering realm belongs to them now. Since they like us, showing up would probably earn Matty headpats for the feat, and we might get a look, but it's no guarantee that we'll get taught anything. And if you really want to imitate them, you have to cut off a section of the warp... which is totally a plan I can get behind, but it's a few generations of poultry down the line.
Oh I have no doubt that among the people without magic who are burned as witches the majority are women, the majority are poor etc... but among the minority of people who are burned at the stake while actually having magic the gender balance is I suspect far more even because odds are the murder was caused by someone seeing actual magic at which point the hate and fear work the same.
Worldbuilding: Sexism causes women to receive worse treatment and have lower representation in respected institutions of power and learning.
Response: How dare they write society as sexist, don't they know that there's no practical reason why people of different sexes with the same abilities should be treated differently?
Response: How dare they write society as sexist, don't they know that there's no practical reason why people of different sexes with the same abilities should be treated differently?
Burned_Cookie
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I'd actually fight you on that one, societies obsession with the usefulness of people is a bit concerning to me.
People aren't tools, to be judged by how well they get the jobs done. They are themself, and that should be more than enough, with all other being secondary.
These people you are talking about are explosions of daemons waiting to happen. It does not matter if the higher ups of the colleges respect them as individuals. It is patently asinine that they would not seek to induct them as much as the men. Women not getting as high rank as men is sexism, what is in that text is insanity for anyone who knows how magic works, like say a wizard.
K von Carstein
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The problem with GW's world building isn't that there's sexism. It's that apparently there's so few women in the Colleges that no one seems to know what to do about them. That's nonsense, the Colleges want to grab as many potential wizards as possible and there's an equal distribution among the sexes.
Even if due to society there's less women in the Colleges, there's certainly more than enough to have a proper protocol in place.
K von Carstein
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In our world sure, but in this world -under threat from all sides- wizards are flatly more useful than most people.
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I see what you mean, but... That "response" part is sometimes used to criticise media that includes sexism "for realism" in settings that are otherwise anything but historical. There's nothing mandatory about sexism, after all - it's entirely possible to simply write a non-sexist society!
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The big problem for me is that the writing itself feels self-contradictory and sexist.
It states that women are common in the Jade and Amber orders (because women are naturally drawn to life-magic) and that the Bright's are waiting on a prophesied female Magister who shall be an unparalleled battle wizard, but somehow most colleges (i.e. the remaining five?) have no idea what to do when a woman joins. They just get so confused that they have to have the woman sleep in a converted dormitory (converted both from and into a dormitory), and have the household staff who handle everyone's clothing etc. handle her clothing etc. And once that woman leaves they immediately forget about women once more.
It's not in-universe sexism, they explicitly treat female apprentices just the same as male ones, it's just that somehow every time a female magister graduates her college immediately decides they'll never again have a female apprentice and thus the next apprentice to come along requires them to once again convert the empty dormitory into a dormitory.
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K von Carstein
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Abs we're talking of GW, it's expected of the writers to be bad /s
Romv
A Memory of TREES
I think people are reading too much into something written without a unified vision of what the Colleges are supposed to be like. Realms of Sorcery feels inconsistent in general, but also seems, at times, to be more interested in evoking the atmosphere of old-fashioned conservative (sexist) academia than rational world building. Which is not an illegitimate choice to make, even if it's not what everyone is looking for.
MiracleGrow
Miracles for only $19.99 [They/Them]
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Why do you people break out of the woodwork everytime we try to have something nice?
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I'm sorry but I'm just gonna have to rip into this ignorance right here
You are telling me, that out of the hundreds of Magisters and thousands of members of the Colleges that next to none of them are women?
That the very idea of a woman in one of the Colleges is so unprecedented that they don't even have a dormatory for them? They've just never encountered the idea before?
Magic talent does not discriminate between gender, so with roughly equal numbers of potential recruits within the whole Empire, you are telling me that thousands of men manage avoid the stake long enough to find their way to the Colleges but virtually every single woman is killed
Because the lore detail people are annoyed about isn't that the women are outnumbered 3 to 1, or 10 to 1
Or that men occupy more higher positions than women
The lore detail asserts that women are so rare that they have no existing accomodations for them at all, and just get shoved into random converted storage rooms for lack of any better solution
8 Colleges that have been operating for almost 200 years at this point, with thousands (Minor talents and perpetuals included) of members, and in all that time women have been so damn rare that they've never set up any proper housing for them at all
That isn't just sexist writing, that's mindbogglingly stupid and makes no sense
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