Mad Dogs and Englishmen

via http://ift.tt/2r1CpW2:
I am having so much fun with my 3-5 year olds it isn’t even funny.

So we were given the biggest load of patriarchal crap for our topic this month. Fairy tales is all well and good but when the pictures are just straight up ‘princess screams and needs to be rescued, knight fights dragon’, you know it isn’t going to wash with the Frozen generation.

(Thank you Disney for Queen Elsa. Thank you so much.)

So I’ve been giving my kids a choice. They can fight the dragon (Great Wyrm Red, aka me) as a knight with a sword (lv 20 paladin with sword of dragon slaying) or as a princess (wizard level 20 with ice meteor swarm). 

I’m getting a very satisfyingly gender mixed group choosing to be princesses so they can blast me with loud whooshing sounds. The dragon is doing a lot of screaming to help drill that vocabulary word.

Perspective	Score
Liberal feminist	43
Women of Color	43
Socialist feminist	40
Radical feminist	40
Cultural feminist	24
Conservative	10

My feminist perspective scale. Yeah, it's pretty accurate, I identify with liberal feminism more than anything else, and I try and be as minimally racist as possible (a total null is, unfortunately, pretty much impossible in this culture)

Please note that this test is at time a bit wooly and a few times I plain didn't understand the questions.
I mean, what the hell does this even mean: "Beauty is feeling one's womanhood through peace, caring, and nonviolence."

That's just a complete wordsalad. The words are there, but not much meaning. Also, as a British female, I laugh and laugh at the notions that women are inherently kinder and gentler that men. The most hardarse vicious and crushingly dictatorial British Prime Minister of my lifetime was Margaret Thatcher. The country is still trying to crawl out from under her thumb.

Eigth class of Krav Maga and the physical difference between me and my male classmates is really sinking in. They punch waaaaay harder than I do, and their bulk makes them harder to drop. Then again, we were sparring hard for something like ten minutes, and by the end my two male sparring partners were totally blown and exhausted, and I was still bouncing around.

And the not being worried about kicks to the groin, that's a nice bonus too.

I am having the most epic bruises ATM. Fuck knows what work is going to think when I go back on Sunday, they'll freak out.

Okay, I've finally got the point of the game where I'm running out of palces to go and am realising I have to get back to the main plot soon. So it's a good time to say what I think.

It is awesome.

Not quite Mass Effect awesome, the plot isn't that high and the endless choices you have with your character kinda ends up being pointless because there's no way for the game world to interact with your choices (again, unlike Mass Effect). However, the fact that I have to go all the way up to my FAVOURITE GAME OF ALL TIME to find it lacking is a damn good sign :)

I'm not sure if I can say it's better than Fallout 3. It's better in many ways, but I love post-apocalyptic settings and had Mirek to play with (before he moved to ME and refused to come out), so it's a purely personal bias. Objectively Skyrim is better.

I also give it major pointers for not being a totaslly derivatve setting. Yes there's elves and dragons and stuff, but the fact that it's been set in a very particular part of the Elder Scrolls world means it's got a lot of originality, in this case, the world of vikings.

I love vikings.

It feels very real. I mean, there's all these people and they have their own politics and stuff. The people who aren't Nords (the viking people) have to deal with discrimination (the situation of the Kajiit people is very reminiciant of attitudes towards the Roma), there's a civil war taking place between the Empire, who are pretty politically dodgy and allied with some even worse people, and the Stormcloaks, who are pretty cool freedom fighters, but a bit 'Nordland for the Nords'.

 But the bit I liked the most was with the situation of women. This is why I love vikings. For the period in IRL, if you had to be a woman anywhere in Europe, you could do worse than vikingland. Women could hold land, could rule, could fight. And Skyrim really takes than and goes with it. None of this 'it's medieval times so we can treat women like shite' from so many video games. Women rulers, women soldiers, women fighters, pretty equal opportunities while still have enough limit so we can see the society's perception of a woman's role: not half bad, but not there yet.

Also, the only skimpy costumes I can think of is that of the forsaken women, and seriously, pay attention because this is the only time I am going to use the equivelancy argument: The forsaken women wear fur bikinis, the forsaken men wear fur loincloths. All this tells me if that they like sporting beachwear in arctic climates. Normally I hate the equivelancy argument, but in this case it stands. Men and women are poisted the same, they fight the same, the camera doesn't pan to portions of their anatomy (unless you want to point it there yourself).

Also, you get female undead. The undead are these withered lurching zombie tomb-guardy things, and yeah, it makes sense to have female ones. This is just about the first time I've seen that happen. Fuck you Bioware and your 'how can we make female aliens? Give them boobs and lipstick?' No. Fuck you and the EA horse you rode in on. Skyrim has female guardian-mummy-zombies. What's your excuse?