I'm here to rescue you"
Eminem - Superman
Dwarf Fortress features a ludicrously detailed list of possible combat actions and injuries. A battle report reads like the intersection of hammers and crossbow bolts with an entire anatomy textbook... plus vomiting and existential angst. Even if they're unarmed, your dwarves will gleefully engage the local wildlife in fisticuffs. Now, fantasy dwarves are a hardy folk by nature and your particular group is assumed to consist of rough-and-tumble pioneering types, so this may come as no surprise. It's a bit more jarring seeing a bloodthirsty troll tear its way through your garrison squad toward a visiting human noble's consort, presumably a pampered, hoity-toity "bit of stuff" damsel in distress... only for said pampered damsel to bite the troll and only after that grab her axe, float like a butterfly around the beast filleting it to near death then finish it off by lopping off half its freaking skull!
Now, Dwarf Fortress was built around dwarves, the fantasy race most notoriously lacking in sexual dimorphism, so thematically it's unsurprising to find bearded ladies acting much the same as bearded gents. Especially true since your stout little underlings are represented by very simple ideograms and text. No character models or voice acting, nothing to identify them as male or female in an intuitive sense anyway. It would actually take extra development time to differentiate them.
So, though it's technically guilty of the same crime, I'm less inclined to blame Dwarf Fortress' forced, one-sided, facetious re-balancing of the sexes on feminist dogma, as it obviously is in wealthier games. Like, say, The Elder Scrolls, for instance, where town guards and mercenaries are as often as not female, because everything boys can do girls can do better, so there! End. Of. Story. We're permitted to give the matter no more thought for fear of transgressing the dictates of the moral majority.
Hmm.
Actually, y'know what? Let's do some transgressin'.
That this decades-long trend is mere feminist propaganda, facetious glorification of women and not any sort of egalitarianism is easily verifiable by counting the villains and heroines in any game which forces female characters into masculine roles. Even the relatively daring and risque Pillars of Eternity, which toyed with the idea of negative female divinities and feminine crimes, kept these conveniently off-screen while pitting, front and center and in lavishly voice-acted groaning detail, a male villain versus two female martyrs, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
It also goes without saying that while filling their rosters with amazons, such entertainment products will make no effort to lend male characters in return the moral high ground, the presumed innocence and entitlement reserved for women, but for now let's focus on the supposedly egalitarian even split between genders among soldiers, town guards and every other violent role in games.
Sounds good at first, I know. It seems a neat way of washing your hands of the question of sexism, while tacitly endorsing the socially acceptable brand of sexism, misandry. How can portraying the sexes as equal possibly be wrong?
Well, as it happens, Pillars of Eternity's poorer cousin, Tyranny, decided to get edgy about sexual roles. In addition to the aforementioned 50/50 split among hired thugs and thuggettes, it also featured an androgynous world dictator, a female-chauvinist-led society (naturally, they're the good guys) and a female-dominated anthropoid race. I've gushed before about how much I like Kills-in-Shadow and the rest of Tyranny's beastwomen. They actually work, conceptually, as female warriors, not perfectly but to a much greater extent than humans. Here, take a look at what came out of a beastwoman's brood-hole:
See, the main problem with the sick pretense that women might share equally in danger alongside men is that it's utter bullshit from an evolutionary perspective. Look up a term called neoteny, if you've never heard it, the retention of infantile physical or behavioral features into adulthood. Yes, human males are neotenized. Check even a standard burly, bearded lumberjack's face against an adult chimp's. We Homos are freaking adorable by comparison, thankyouverymuch! But anything males can dish out in the cuteness department pales in comparison to women. Smaller, less hairy, more babyish in their bone structure, giggling and cooing and crying in youthful high-pitched voices and artificially enlarging their eyes with make-up, human females have evolved to elicit levels of protectiveness normally reserved for the species' young - from each other, sure, but mostly from their tribe's males, the less-cute-by-comparison short end of the evolutionary stick. By default, human females don't fight their own battles as long as there's a male around to fight on their behalf, champion their cause.
In a species already dependent on social interaction, women go one better. Instead of evolving for personal ability in the physical world, femininity, in humans, has specialized in social manipulation, in extracting service from males. The male's role in the trinity of "-and baby makes three" is to get bled for everything he's got then thrown under the bus to protect his (presumed (often incorrectly)) genetic investment. The children of men who have accepted this sacrificial role have had a better chance at survival. The children of women who have successfully played on men's protectiveness have also had a better chance at survival. Their genetic material, their predispositions have passed on to us.
Most of this stems from the utterly debilitating effects of our very slow, prolonged gestation and infancy. Human foetuses and infants are needy little fuckers, not only in themselves but extending to their primary caregiver as well. Mothers have, for most of history and prehistory, simply not been in a position to fend for themselves. A less debilitating form of motherhood with a less absolute investment (redundant backup offspring) helps, and if you really want to create a race of warrior women, then you'd also likely be talking about a race with higher paternal than maternal parental investment. For that to hold true, males would have to be certain it's their sperm fertilizing a woman's eggs, as the prospect of cuckoldry puts a huge damper on the benefit of paternal investment.
So you'd likely be talking about a species of fish or amphibian-like egg-layers where the males care for the eggs and young, are smaller and cuter than females and less apt to travel, live longer and tend to put their mates through the wringer before deigning to fertilize their eggs, to ensure they're not stuck caring for sub-par material.
But to return to the example of Tyranny, you can also see how much more consistent Kills-in-Shadow is in her tough bitch nature compared to the much more poorly conceived and developed Verse. While initially presenting Verse as a sadistic, bloodthirsty cut-throat (and cut-everything-else) the game's writers simply couldn't resist also imbuing her with that all-too-girly vulnerability and pathos, yielding a downright schizophrenic characterization: a vicious killer whom you're expected to pity every time her voice acting suggests she's pouting or scared. Ooohh, my sisters, my poor sisters, boo-hoo, my poor sadistic sociopathic sisters.
Bullshit.
-and the simple fact that most people will swallow such bullshit without a second thought speaks volumes as to the steel grip femininity holds on our communal psyche.
As a last note, human reproduction and infancy have not only shaped our evolution but have presented a very clear logistical problem for iron-fisted dictators throughout history. The upper classes need the lower classes to reproduce as much as possible, as quickly as possible. Women's most productive role from the point of view of the wealthy is in producing more cannon fodder, more wage slaves for the good of the only entity above the level of chromosomes which directly benefits from reproduction: the tribal unit or state. The few times women have been forced into dangerous work (e.g. factory work) has been during periods of rapid industrialization or when the male workforce is already depleted. Otherwise, keep safe and keep cranking out those crib-stuffers.
So it makes absolutely no sense for Tyranny's resident megalomaniac Kyros to disagree on this central tenet of empire-building with the likes of Hitler, Stalin, most all religions and the American Republican party. Overlord/lady Kyros, the immortal dictator waging constant centuries-long war on the rest of the world, the strategist thinking whole generations in advance, would in no logical way allow the use of women in combat. Not unless Kyros can conjure babies out of thin air. (I assume that brand of magic's sigils would take two hands to portray. [O<-<-)
Warrior women will occasionally arise in most human societies (and they can make excellent stand-alone characters in fiction) but they only make sense as exceptions to the rule, not replacing the blatantly obvious human norm of female self-preservation and the sacrifice of males in their stead. Actually making women carry their weight in dangerous, unhealthy or otherwise harmful enterprises never enters into the equation. At least not when you're talking about the human species, that species divided into a cute, seductive, self-serving, emotionally manipulative half and the other, male half: disposable, easily dismissed as unlikeable and expected to place itself in danger to profit the cute ones. If you want some other guiding principle, then you'll need to fabricate an alien species for which that principle would make sense. At the very least make them into bearded ladies.
(Or better yet, think up some humans, male and female, consciously attempting to transcend their biological limitations. Including innate male slavishness before female whims.)
'cause I can't be your Superman, can't be your Superman, your Supermaan, your Supermaaan...
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