RBrandon wrote:The entire purpose for this thread is moot since this "alluring femininity" actually has nothing to do with mesmerization, "the mermaid chants a haunting song." That this is a powerful magical attack is made more apparent by the fact that you literally cannot move away from the mesmerization source, which would presumably be untrue of sexuality with all but the least robust of self-control. Especially when the source of this mesmerization proceeds to try to kill you.
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Finally, Crawl is set in an entirely different, fictional universe. These cultures represented would have their own ideas on gender roles and the like. Applying our own values to them is silly.
Fictional universes do not have reality independent from human experience. Any fictional world we create is a product of our own interests, perceptions, values, assumptions, and biases. Telling us
NOT to apply our values to fiction is silly; there is literally no way to experience a work of fiction without it intersecting with our own values.
For a creator, the fact that your world is fictional does not give you a free pass to perpetuate harmful stereotypes, whether unthinkingly or intentionally. When you create, you make choices: you can choose to make a sexist, racist, homophobic world in which people treat those ideologies as normal and acceptable; you can choose to make a world in which people are aware of inequality and injustice and make the conscious decision to fight against it; or you can choose to make a world where the issues that plague humanity today have been resolved, and people have new and different causes to fight for. No matter what you choose, you can't expect your audience to uncritically accept that "this is just the way things are here." You need to give them good reason to think that the state of affairs you describe is a natural consequence of the values, attitudes and behaviors of the world's fictional inhabitants. That's what world-building is all about. And the way you justify your fictional world -- and whether you present those justifications as sympathetic or antagonistic to the characters the audience is meant to care about -- says a lot about the values, attitudes and behaviors you display in the real world.
All this is to say that the flavor text defining mermaids' mesmerizing power is just one part of the way Crawl presents mer-people, and the overall presentation is rooted in sexualization of femininity. The mermaid is the only humanoid monster species to have its gender explicitly stated. Its tile is scantily clad in a bikini top and loincloth. Note that vanilla merfolk (which default to male in the tile set) are at least as naked, and presumably just as capable of singing -- but they don't have the same power over the player. The flavor text about their song is basically whitewash; someone, at some point in Crawl's development, decided that to be mesmerizing is to be feminine is to be sexualized.
A lot of people have brought up mythology in this thread: another kind of fiction, just as much a product of vaules/assumptions/biases/etc. It's true that the mythology of sirens is very similar to
some versions of the mermaid myth. But as some folks have pointed out, fish-human creatures take on a wide variety of role in mythologies from around the world; sirens are pretty specific to Greek mythology (and they're really more of a bird-human hybrid, but that's beside the point). Crawl's inclusion of sirens seems to be an intentional reference to the creature of Greek myth. The Greeks thought of sirens as female, and as I've said I'm OK with Crawl's sirens being female too on that basis; but we should recognize that it's one of many examples throughout history in which female sexuality is portrayed as dangerous (and therefore must be controlled by men), which is a problematic thing to perpetuate. But since mer-person myths give us such a broader range of attributes to draw from, there's no solid mythological justification for why
any of them are capable of mesmerizing -- much less why mer-women are capable but mer-men are not.
And even if there were such justification, there would still be nothing forcing the devs to include it in Crawl. They have a choice in how to build and justify this portion of the Crawl world, and we -- as a section of the Crawl player community, the audience -- have every right to apply our values and to question whether that choice is the right one.
Friday, 7th March 2014, 19:27 
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