Tomb Titivator
Posts: 909
Joined: Thursday, 3rd January 2013, 20:32
Proposal: Make monster mer* more gender-equitable
Sirens I get: it's a mythical creature, traditionally female, that sings an enchanting song to lure sailors to their deaths. But mermaids don't have the same direct association with mesmerism, as far as I know. And as long as the game considers sirens to be a separate species, I have to wonder why it is that Crawl contains mermaids who can mesmerize the player, and merfolk who cannot.
Frankly, I suspect it is the unintentional result of sexist and heteronormative assumptions.
Merfolk are obviously mermen. The gender-neutral catchall "folk" is here co-opted to normalize the masculine, as though the default sex for any mer-person is male. Meanwhile the mer-females' femininity is explicitly called out, then used to marginalize them into a separate, gender-specified group. The label "maid" conjures a patronizing history of servitude towards, and sexual repression and/or exploitation by, men: the barmaid, the milkmaid, the (presumably virgin) handmaiden -- all are routinely sexualized as objects of male fantasy, and historically lack significant social and economic power. The mermaid of Crawl is no different. Scantily clad, she is clearly a lesser warrior than the better-armed merfolk (to say nothing of the impaler, javelineer, or aquamancer). In fact, the only thing that makes her dangerous at all is her alluring femininity, which the player -- who, apparently, is assumed to be a heterosexual man -- cannot resist.
What about the hetero women or gay men who play Crawl? Where is the sexy merman whose alluring masculinity will have the same mesmerizing effect?
Crawl does a lot of things right in the way of gender parity. The many feminine Uniques are a testament to the variety of roles and personalities that can be embodied by female characters when the effort is made to craft them as whole individuals -- even in a game where concepts like "story" and "character" often verge on abstraction. I love that many of the enemies that most terrify me in this game are women.
On the other hand, I also like that Crawl's monsters are, for the most part, ungendered. The majority of humanoid monster species, including gnolls, kobolds, centaurs, elves, ogres and trolls, look neither particularly masculine nor especially feminine (most of them just look ugly). This is even largely true of orcs, although the recent tiles update to single-strap robes for priests and wizards could be interpreted as a bit risque.
But the point is that there are precedents that suggest how to deal with the mer-sexism. We can fix this.
Therefore, be it proposed:
- Mermaids should be merged with vanilla merfolk, so the nominally gender-neutral label "merfolk" would become truly gender-encompassing. The tile could be redesigned to be more gender-neutral, or they could have a 50/50 chance to generate with either of the existing tiles.
- Any individual vanilla merfolk that would generate with throwing nets should instead have a 50/50 chance to generate with either nets or the Mesmerize ability. The odds could be higher or lower, of course -- the goal would be not to change the difficulty of Shoals in any meaningful way. So probably it should be more like (spawn rate of merfolk with nets)/(spawn rate of mermaids).
- Stats for the merged species should be balanced between the two original species. They're already pretty similar, but mermaids grant almost twice as much XP -- presumably because Mesmerize can be so dangerous. I don't know if there's a way to tie the XP for an individual merfolk to whether or not they received Mesmerize in the coin toss, or whether it would need to be a single fixed number that reflected the overall risk posed by the merged species. Either way, I'm sure it can be balanced to minimize the effect of the change.
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