Good point about slavery pretty much inherently equaling sexual slavery. (Or at least including it. All slaves might not be raped, but the risk would always be there. Never mind it pretty explicitly being the point of Hutt slaves.)
I suppose I hadn't really thought about it because dystopian universe, and because the Star Wars universe has generally been portrayed (at least post-Return of the Jedi) as filled with slavery. Which doesn't excuse it! Or my ignoring it! It's a seriously disturbing aspect of the universe, especially when there's a tendency by the creators to make it cozy (Phantom Menace) or at least gloss over what slavery actually means. (For example, I haven't encountered any official Star Wars fiction that acknowledges that the Hutt dancing girls and such are sex slaves, even to the extent that Return of the Jedi does. Not that I've read all existing Star Wars fiction, but...)
It would've been far better for the game designers to skip that aspect of the universe, or even to limit slavery to Hutt space and take it seriously. The joke and the Sith Warrior thing? Yikes. Also no. Also WTF were they thinking? And I thought the companion romances were problematic!
(Which isn't to say that a universe full of slavery would be A-Okay if they didn't joke about it, but those two things really give a disturbing impression of where at least some of the game writers' minds were. At it is _not_ a pretty place. In fact it's well into "I wouldn't want to be alone with them" category.)
How can they on the one hand write stories that are pretty good on the woman hero front and on the other hand clearly think that women aren't people? Should I be feeling very sorry for the class story writers? (Also, isn't Bioware usually _good_ about gender stuff? What the hell was going on here? Or has it always been seriously of two minds like this?)
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winterfish
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Date: 2013-08-28 01:15 am (UTC)I suppose I hadn't really thought about it because dystopian universe, and because the Star Wars universe has generally been portrayed (at least post-Return of the Jedi) as filled with slavery. Which doesn't excuse it! Or my ignoring it! It's a seriously disturbing aspect of the universe, especially when there's a tendency by the creators to make it cozy (Phantom Menace) or at least gloss over what slavery actually means. (For example, I haven't encountered any official Star Wars fiction that acknowledges that the Hutt dancing girls and such are sex slaves, even to the extent that Return of the Jedi does. Not that I've read all existing Star Wars fiction, but...)
It would've been far better for the game designers to skip that aspect of the universe, or even to limit slavery to Hutt space and take it seriously. The joke and the Sith Warrior thing? Yikes. Also no. Also WTF were they thinking? And I thought the companion romances were problematic!
(Which isn't to say that a universe full of slavery would be A-Okay if they didn't joke about it, but those two things really give a disturbing impression of where at least some of the game writers' minds were. At it is _not_ a pretty place. In fact it's well into "I wouldn't want to be alone with them" category.)
How can they on the one hand write stories that are pretty good on the woman hero front and on the other hand clearly think that women aren't people? Should I be feeling very sorry for the class story writers? (Also, isn't Bioware usually _good_ about gender stuff? What the hell was going on here? Or has it always been seriously of two minds like this?)