Gender roles in Errant Story

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In which are described the roles of male and female in the various societies of the Poe-verse. None other than Poe himself wrote a long analysis of this subject in the Forum, so without further ado:

Poe Notes:|

(Taken from this thread in the Forum)

This was a topic that came up in a forum thread for last wesnesday's comic... I started a response about it, but it grew a bit large and so I'm posting it here instead.

Concerning the Ensigerum, it didn't take long for the Elves to notice that male humans tended to be larger and stronger than the females and being as they were a society that had always had gender equality and no major physiological differences between sexes (besides the naughty bits of course) their response to this was something along the lines of "huh, I guess we should use just the males for the heavy lifting and combat stuff since they're much more suited for it." and so there were no female Ensigerum while they worked for the elves.

This was continued for a while even after the Ensigerum were exiled. But necessity soon overoad tradition and they slowly began to train women in many of their techniques. At first it was for the sake of their own self-defense (it was not a very nice world to live in back then) and so that they could serve as trainers for the younger male monks. This eventually led to full-fledged female monks.

Also, on a related note, I recall several people asking in previous threads if Anita was the first female Imperator the Order has ever had. No, she's actually the third. Infact, the first Imperatrix was the person who first developed the early time acceleration magic techniques (which was why she got the promotion, really).

Concerning the various nations. As mentioned above, the Elves are completely equal. There is no major difference in height or physical strength between male and female elves. And female elves spend such a tiny portion of their lives pregnant or caring for a child, assuming they become pregnant at all, that they just don't spend enough time doing it to get shoehorned into a primary child rearing/broodmare role.

Farrel has over the last couple of hundred years become mostly equal. Woman can vote, own property, hold positions of power (though that's still rather rare), etc. However there are still some roles and professions that they just aren't supposed to do, such as military, law enforcement and the like. Infact, in the original story that Jon and Sara were created for Sara's reasons for join the Wraiths were because it was the only group that was even allowing women to join. It's worth noting that prior to dissolving their monarchy some 300 years before the start of Errant story; the throne was passed from ruling Queen to Queen. (Of course there were some problems with the last two queens that were so bad that the last was dethroned and executed)

Tsuiraku, having been on a completely different developmental track from the rest of the world, is more or less equal. Though there are a few odd gender quirks here and there, as Meji bitched about in an early chapter.

Veracia doesn’t really have much in the way of equality. Women there still very definitely have less right and opportunities than men, and though I wouldn’t say it’s as bad as medieval era Europe was, but its not far off from it ether.

The Northern Confederacy varies wildly city by city. With some places having some measure of equal rights and some Gor like places where women are more or less slaves.

Trolls, as mentioned elsewhere, are strictly matriarchal and male trolls who are not warriors or craftsmen are considered little better than slaves.

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