Zontar said:
Happyninja42 said:
And there is nothing saying that they don't have a different word for the "other partner" when it comes to defining who gave birth and who didn't. Since we never actually hear anyone use the Asari native language, and are hearing everyone speaking English (or whatever language you set it too), they are of course limited to the vocabulary available to that language. You know, so the audience knows what the hell they are talking about.
While that could be true, that doesn't really do anything to explain the retconing of the fact that the Asari now have male pronouns and trans individuals explicitly (with no relation to them being the non-birthing parent in a relationship) thanks to Andromeda. There's really no way to reconcile it with previous canon.
Actually I think it does work with the male pronoun, like I said in my previous post, about that term being used to denote the Asari who provided genetic/psychic material for the child, but didn't actually gestate and give birth.
Now, the transgender terms introduced in Andromeda, I can't speak on that, haven't played the game, don't plan on it. I'm only referring to that scene in ME 3 with Liara's father. I have no issue with how it was presented in that game. Bioware is perfectly capable of doing stupid stuff in other ways, in other games. They've certainly got a track record for dumb game decisions with their other lines.
But, there is I think, some validity in arguing for them deciding how to identify themselves. If a species is uni-gender, is it accurate to use the term "she" anyway? What does "she" mean in a species that has no gender deviation? It's entirely possible, and I think likely, that it's just an artifact of human speech patterns, and that they designed the Asari to look female, based on HUMAN traits. But, considering that there is that scene in ME 3, where the 3 different species are all arguing about what the Asari actually look like, would a "she" classification even fit? It reminds me of a tv show from the 80's, called Alien Nation. In a series of episodes, they go into detail about the reproductive cycle of the alien species. And for their species, both parties end up "carrying" the baby, but in the end, the "male" is the one that actually gives birth to the final product. Yet, they still refer to him as "he", and he is perfectly fine with this gender classification. Yet, he was, biologically doing stuff, that for our planet, is limited (in most cases) to the female. So I don't really see how it's that big of a stretch, for a fictional, alien species, to use gender terms in a way that is different from us.
Perhaps, in their species, the terms he/she, are used to denote differences in personality. Or, maybe they just don't use them at all really, and have since adopted them, for dealing with multi-gender species, to try and differentiate something in their own species, that doesn't really have a proper allegory in ours. It's simply a lost in translation kind of thing, and the closest they can come up with is to use "he" when trying to refer to that type of person from their species.
This is all speculation of course, I don't know what Bioware was actually thinking when they came up with it. But since the species is completely fictional, any and all aspects of them are completely up to change by the creators. That and they can always chalk it up to "This was an aspect of their culture that just never came up before."
