sspellweaver replied to your post “Did you hear the conversation in the cultural center where the asari...”
To be fair, all the previous codex entries have been from a human perspective. I think I remember Liara complaining about how humans assume their gender?
Yes. True. The codex says the asari are an “all-female race” - Liara contradicts that in one scene by saying:
"Most of the inaccuracies are centered around our mating rituals. My species is mono-gendered. "Male" and "female" have no real meaning for us."
The biology entry speaks of them having only one gender but that’s about it. The codex also uses female pronouns.
But do they identify as female? No. It has no meaning to them. They don’t identify as male either, only as asari.
And true, there are issues with the translator.
When talking about Benezia's other partner who conceived her, Liara says:
"She rarely spoke of her partner, though I know my father --if you want to use that term--was another asari."
When you meet Matriarch Aethyta (Benezia’s partner) in ME2, she talks about her past saying “When I was a girl” - the in-game explanation is that the translator will translate the asari word she used as “girl.”
The out of game explanation is that Bioware is not good enough to deal with subtleties and just uses the simplest words.
She could also have used a term specific to asari, when I was a Maiden. And even then, those are already translated words reinforcing they’re “female” - Maiden, Matron, Matriarch...
In ME3, you have this dialogue:
Aethyta: Yeah... Matriarch Benezia was... was her mother, and she doesn't know it, but I was her father.
Shepard: You mean you were her other mother, right?
Aethyta: No, I didn't pop her out. Hell, she's never even met me.
Shepard: Sorry, if you were human, you'd both be called the mother, regardless of which one gave birth.
Aethyta: Well, I'm not human, am I? Anthropocentric bag of dicks.
I mean, it’s all fine and good, but it’s still one conversation in a sea of bad ones. And the issues with the translators don’t fully explain the confusion about the asari.
In the end, I think you’re right about the codex. It isn’t precise or/and accurate. It’s confusing enough (mono-gendered? all-female?) that people simply believe the asari are female.
The new codex entries in Andromeda try to rectify that.
They’re no longer presented as an all-female race: “Though they appear feminine to many species, asari are a mono-gendered species.”
Small steps I guess. But it is interesting. It begs the question: when can we blame Bioware and when should we focus on in-game explanations?
Me, I think Bioware is definitely at fault. They’re not always consistent with them. That one scene about them prefering different pronouns in MEA - it’s good but never applied in the trilogy. To me that shows a bad handling of their own lore. Because it’s one thing for the codex to say this or that but the asari in the game aren’t tied to the codex. So why aren’t they constantly correcting people who automatically use female pronouns?
There is also the entire context behind the asari creation (they were meant to be a “race of beautiful, blue alien girls”). They’re supposed to be “desirable as potential love interests.” That indicates to me that they always wanted them to be female, but got caught up in their own lore inaccuracies and realized they had to rectify that.
