Or, Sexual Dimorphism in Guild Wars 2
Now that the sylvari have made their grand re-entrance in numerous articles in gaming news, this is a question that has been popping up as those who haven’t been following GW2 (or simply not following as rabidly as others) get exposed to this new race. So, why is it, folks wonder, that a race of sentient plant people whose bodies are mere illusions of humanoid forms, have secondary sex characteristics such as breasts (or beards; nobody seems to ask why sylvari have beards)?
It begins with the story of a man and a centaur. The human Ronan, upon finding his village had been slaughtered by the White Mantle and their Mursaat, planted a seed on his family’s graves, vowing to live peacefully from that point onward. He was later befriended by a centaur named Ventari, who shared Ronan’s ideals despite the violent history shared between their respective peoples.
After Ronan died, Ventari tended to the sapling that grew upon the human graves, and wrote his thoughts and life lessons on a tablet that he laid at the base of the tree. The sylvari were later born from this Pale Tree, taking the human forms from the land that nurtured it. Hence, boobs. And beards.
While sylvari do have gender, they act entirely without regard to gender with respect to life, chivalry, and love.
…traditional human-style gender roles have no meaning to sylvari, either in their society or in their romantic relationships. Often, a sylvari’s ardor is expressed with courtly zeal—emotional, empathic, personal—and is not necessarily defined by gender.
Angel McCoy, ArenaNet
I think I can safely say, based on the above information, that the reason for the mammalian protrusions is not purely for titillation. First of all, ArenaNet can do better than that for titillation’s sake (see: Norn females, below). Second of all, the following races exist to show that ArenaNet does know what to do with races that have no good biological reason for D-cups:
Charr
As might be expected from our knowledge of cats, female charr do not have visible breasts.
I gave them a choice: either be subtle and downplay the breasts (it wasn’t a point of the race, anyway) or go full-on realistic. Yes, that’s right —none or six!!
-Kristen Perry, ArenaNet
Instead, they are distinguished from male charr by the size and placement of their horns and teeth, a slightly sleeker head shape and a bushier tail. More on the breast issue (and the other issues related to designing the charr) here.
Asura
Here is the final example of a race that does not slap breasts onto the female characters and call it a day. While more information might be forthcoming about whether asura have teats like charr, or simply lack that characteristic altogether, it is apparent that aside from a few variations in head shape and hairstyle – and perhaps clothing – there is no differentiation between male and female asura. There does not even appear to be a notable height difference between the two.
Now that we’ve covered two races without the typical fantasy sexual dimorphism, and one who act entirely without regard to gender and for whom such differences are mere outward forms, we turn to the familiar.
Norn
Here we have possibly the most extreme case of sexual dimorphism in the form of bulk and body structure between the male and female norn. The males seem to be built with a particularly recognizable heft to them, and an allowance for an abundance of hair grooming options on nearly every exposed surface, while the females, unfortunately, venture very close to “large woman” status.
How much we will be able to modify the female norn build and bring it more in line with that of the male is something that I hope we will get to glimpse at the upcoming Gamescom convention. Right now this is probably the most obvious throwback to video game titillation to be found in Guild Wars 2. Fortunately, at least, these female norn can easily break your bones for commenting on their, well, titillation.
Human
Ah, there we go. Nice and reliable and wearing clothes that make sense at a Renaissance Faire. Here you can expect get your usual suspects and a variety of builds (we can hope): men with or without facial hair, slender such as the one above, or perhaps bulkier to a degree currently unknown. Whether women have a slider for their bodice area will be of great interest for those watching the convention footage coming in next week.
All in all, I think ArenaNet has done a good job avoiding many of the tropes and stereotypes about male/female appearance, dress, and behavior when it comes to their race design. We have breasted sylvari who engage in chivalry, asura and charr who don’t have breasts, norn females who drink and fight with the best of them, and humans who are led by a queen with no king in sight.
So the next time someone asks if female sylvari have breasts in order to satisfy the 14-year old male audience, simply challenge them to a duel with your female sylvari character; may the best sylvari win.
And a fun answer to “sylvari female breasts” question that anyone playing a silvari can give is “It is for do photosynthesis better”…
mmmm… that answer sylvari beards too… “It is for have more area for photosynthesis”.
Or maybe this one:
“Please, move to right! You are shading my sunlight and I am photosynthetizing now!”
Anyway, they are plants that try mimetize humans beings. They try be alike humans for better interact with them, then the sylvari females try be “pretty” to humans and the sylvari males have beards.
We too can try imagine the worst case situation…
“It is a trap! If you don’t know it, we sylvari are carnivorous plants,,, mmmmmm…. you appear be well fed, little fly…”
[by the way… I remember vaguelly from the novels that sylvari can eat, or at least taste human food… if they make photosynthesis, there is no reason for they need eat… I think that is a more important questions than sylvari female boobs or sylvari male beards… how efficient is sylvari photosynthesis? and where they get the minerals if they don’t have roots? mmmm… the carnivorous plants thing it is possible…]
The difference between diets in various animals is mostly a result of varied digestive tracts. If the plants are emulating humans it might go so far to make them omnivores and without roots minerals will likely be gathered from digested food. How that system works would be interesting since a sylvari could use more energy in a day than a small tree does all year.
I would suspect that human food really does make up for the difference in photosynthesis levels. The barkier sylvari don’t seem to have much green surface anyway! (THAT would be an interesting cultural difference – green sylvari photosynthesize more, and barky sylvari eat more food.) I’m not so concerned about the lack of roots – there do exist ‘air plants’ that don’t have roots at all, and the carnivorous plants don’t get much from theirs.
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But sylvari are made of leaves… so they don’t have a “true” digestive tract… if they have one…
I guess if sylvari make poo…
Their shit does, in fact, smell of roses.
do Sylvari Grow fruits?
Theres is another question if they poo do the poo fruits?
At least the size/mass of sylvari bodies are pretty equal between sexes, with minimal difference in shape, happy to see skinny males. Charr just come off so much better, the females seem equally ferocious as the males.
The sexual dimorphism does make me wonder where they might take the story, the pale tree gets destroyed then what, those different shapes might come in handy, but if sylvari have been ignoring gender til that point then who will handle the sex ed. 🙂
I wish they’d been more confident with making female norn more robust and coarser looking than female humans. I suppose there could be the options to pick some uglier options at character creation, the sleek hairstyle doesn’t help in that picture, but there is probably too much of a gap to close between male and female bodies. Remembering the reaction to the chunkier norn bandit previously shown, Anet might be surprised by how many would go for a similar look.
Hadn’t really begun to consider the asura gender roles, interesting to note that they don’t seem to have many differences to differentiate themselves. can’t wait for asura week.
I’m seriously hoping we don’t have TOO many Norn customization option with regards to body hair. A hairy, large-chested, FEMALE norn will send me running for the hills! 😀
Neja, I think sylvari are fruits…
I will explain better this hypothesis at a comment of mine at Hunter’s blog.
And, by the way, if sylvari make poo, it need smell like roses.
“How much we will be able to modify the female norn build and bring it more in line with that of the male [. . .]”
Heh, sounds like we have pretty much opposite hopes for norn (female) customization options. The fact that, physically, norn are basically oversized humans gave me an RP idea: a runt norn, barely larger than human-sized, who keeps getting mistaken for human or immature by other norn and thus feels a need to prove him/herself. I could go either way gender-wise but I bet the minimum size for females will be smaller than that for males. Hopefully it’s small enough for my idea to work.
Oh, I would be all for being able to create a tiny norn, too! I’m just for more equilibrium between the sexes either way. Here’s hoping you can make your runt norn :).
I’ve mentioned this before, that most of the male warriors in GW1, at least the ones you find dancing around town in their underwear, are in fact just very young norn. Clearly norn start drinking at a very early age and it is common for young norn males to travel to human areas as a bit of a lark, because even at that age they make the human males look a bit puny. And as they are used to much colder climates, they often shed their clothing to cool down, especially if they’ve had a few drinks.
My theory is that the Pale Tree is a creative being and giving the Sylvari different body types is a way of expressing her creativity. I would not be surprised if over time we see sylvari NPCs that are made in the images of other races. Imagine a sylvari being born in Quaggan form, or Charr form Sylvari. Obviously since sylvari are not a simple reskin of human model it would take a great deal of development time and lore wise the Pale Tree knows humans best.
Why does GW2 hate boobs anyway.. 98% of its player base will be male…
The females of three out of five playable races have breasts in Guild Wars 2 and you say GW2 hates boobs? 😛
As to your second point, you might want to revisit that percentage estimate….
if you look at some of the gw2 gameplay videos, you ca see a large fat female norm enemy in a town invasion event
i can understand that the pale tree not knowing the exact function of the human form would still place all external features of the body in the right place at the right proportions, meaning that females would still have breasts. they may not have any sort of function, but as the tree is trying to mimic form.. why should it avoid the chest??
my question is, if the pale tree only ever saw Ronan and Ventari.. how did it come across a female form of human to replicate?? why arent all sylvari human or centaur?
my answer for that is that that even thought this is a logical point, the people playing will still want a gender choice when playing for aesthetics, some people because they are female and may like to play a beautiful female plant character to suit who they want to be, others because they are male and want to play a sexy female character so they have something nice to look at while they play.
thus arenanet has not discriminated in the creation of the sylvari. who knows, maybe at some point in the 200 odd years there was a female human who just so managed to fall into the site of the pale tree, and thus was replicated as a recognised form of the human race.
The human forms the Pale Tree drew upon were the remains of the members of Ronan’s human village; both men and women (and presumably, children, so a good question might be why there aren’t both child-like and adult-shaped sylvari?).
The meta answer is of course that you will want players to be happy playing the final form of the sylvari, so it’s best to make it appealing to as wide an audience as possible. But I was only talking about an in-game lore reason.
i actually dont think it was the dead vilagers that played any part on the form of the tree now that i think of it..
the lore mentions that Ronan started a refuge for the battle weary on the spot where he planted the tree, and that was how he met ventari, but im sure other travelers, strangers and passers by would have come through the refuge. so the tree would have seen plenty of people during the time that ronan and ventari were there.
Jennah became queen when her father the king died.
Who says the Pale Tree only saw Ronan and Ventari? They welcomed any who wanted peace. You can find Ronan, Ventrari and the young Pale Tree in Eye of the North. I sat down under the tree.
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[…] Sylvari follow that trend? Of course, as always, somebody else can say it much better than I could: Why do Sylvari have boobs by […]
Sylvari form Mimics humans. There are many reasons you can imagine this to be so, from benign (to facilitate acceptance, cooperation and communication while minimizing xenophobic response) to malevolent (mimicry for infiltration, to bait a trap or with a long term goal of replacing non-plant humanoids completely in their ecological, technological and social niche). I hope that Arena Net leaves this mostly up to player imagination, unless they plan on building future plot points based on some of these possibilities.
I don’t see why anyone would pick on the sexual dimorphism among the Norn. We see human couples at even more extreme ends of the spectrum. Many animal species show great size and bulk differences between male and female. The average Norn female is clearly tall and bulky enough to contribute the genes to ensure that most male children will grow up to be large, stocky men. From a game perspective, it’s much better for Arena Net that Norn Females can still come in a form that us modern humans would consider attractive, in order to expand the appeal of the race.
As far as individual customization, Arena Net DOES have access to all the technology that allows character customization in Aion, another NCSoft title not developed by Arena Net. Arena Net has been careful to state that they will put certain restrictions on how extreme a customization the various sliders will allow. Anyone who has seen some of the extremes in Aion knows why they have concerns about this. Limits to keep characters with in ranges that don’t break immersion or completely run counter to the artistic integrity of the title should still allow much variation between individual characters.
One nice thing about the Aion tech is that it handles some pretty extreme variations for character height and weight, with out producing problems with how armor and clothing look on the character.
I have every hope and expectation that GW2 character creation will allow variations that you might find in the human population, minus some percent at each extreme end of the spectrum. Tall, Short, Skinny, Fat, Subtle and Notable Secondary Sex Characteristics, (breast size, hip to waist ratio, facial characteristics) etc…
“Sylvari biology is very different from any other race. They do not have internal organs, but instead are formed of growing plant matter, sap for blood, leaves and bark for skin. A jaw, for example, can be formed by leaves, vines, or even shards of bark that grow and press together to form the silhouette, but if you look closely you can still see the fibers and holes of the structure. Instead of bones, an arm is a mass of tightly-woven stems and leaves that work together to do the work of such a limb.”
Okay… I think that “sylvari don’t make poo” is a strong possibility now… they don’t have a digestive tract… no idea what they do with the food they eat, but maybe they wait it decompose, then they absorb the nutrients.
They too appear don’t have a central nervous system. “They do not have internal organs[…]” rules out a brain.
Well, at least sylvari are immune to zombie attacks…
[…] escape it. They do a lot of things right in both Guild Wars games: the sylvari’s sexuality, the gender dimorphism of the non-human races, the diversity of clothing options for characters, the focus on people of color in designing Elona […]
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