Good point. 

Best regards,
Steven.

It may be interesting to talk about the politics of fantasy, but as the developers have clearly gone out of their way to include female characters as both rulers and warriors, I don't see the use of the word "men" as a concern at all.  This is more about university speech codes than actual bias.

An Amazon faction would be cool.

Not to add fuel to the fire, lol, but ever notice how the word "people" defaults to meaning "white people"? I double-checked in the sovereign selection and unit design screens--they're all white people.

Tolkienesque medieval fantasy tends to be both male- and European-centric.  It struck me as ironic that, in Elemental, the most evil races appear to be even more white than the default humans.  Usually, the "evil races" appear to be modeled after racist caricatures of "savages" and thugs; whereas, in Elemental, so far, they look like diseased versions of the default humans (which nonetheless appear to be white people); it's very consistent; although, of course, there still are quasi-racist Tolkien monsters present, like orcs and goblins.  It will be interesting to see if expansions include new continents, peopled by non-white men and women.  Really, that could present an interesting opportunity to break stereotypes, by introducing highly advanced "African" factions, for example.  Say these people come over from across the ocean, and their magic/technology is so advanced that it makes the white people of the current world look like primitives, and the white people flee in terror from them.

This will also no doubt be addressed by modders who will create Asian, sci-fi, and other fantasy worlds, which will include more diversity.

Fuck political correctness.

If you want to have something other than kingdoms of men because its overused that's cool.

LOL. Another feminist trying to ruin everyone's fun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_(Middle-earth)

Just call them all "Mostly Bags of Water" and be done with it. LOL!

As an Anthropologist, I approve your use of the word Hominid, but you know I'm pretty sure all the Fallen count as Homonids too.

This isn't really political correctness, though...this is more silly than anything. This is how the English language is structured, and the cliches are there so people have something to grasp onto. Elemental is a Medieval Fantasy game, which has a heavily European (English) and Male bias. While I'd certainly be happy to see other races or types of civilizations than the Medieval Peasantyness, I wouldn't necessarily expect it from this game. (Though I'd like to see more people make games and stories /not/ set in Medieval European Fantasy Worlds.)

When it comes to fantasy Tolkien tends to be the archetype more often than not, and due to the patriarchal anglocentric undertones in his stories, it tends to pass into most fantasy.

I'm Hispanic and I'm not insulted by the fact that a game based on European Medieval Fantasy features White people. Now The Last Airbender...that's more something you should be upset at. An Asian-Inspired Fantasy world turned into bland nonsense by a bad director replacing A Tibetan and two Eskimos with white people.

That being said, I'd certainly be happy if I could make a Mongolian-type horsemen faction, or a faction of Tribal Forest Dwellers...but I won't count on it.

When I said 'Tribal Forest Dwellers' what I was thinking of was 'Wood Elves' but knowing that Elves don't exist in Elemental's World, I offered a counterfeit substitution but with the same image in my head.

Bows, leaves, leather armor, green cloaks. Yay cliches.

Still, would be noticably different then how most of the factions operate in beta. At the moment Stealth and Ranged combat aren't really very effective tactics for long-terms, and you can't build inside of forests.

While these assholes above me are super-diplomatic, I sort of agree with them to a certain extent. I argued heavily in a prior thread that female characters should not be gimped. However, there is sort of an established setting here which takes place in a male-dominated society. There's a certain extent where I think for game purposes such civilizations should be flexible enough to allow female characters, I think the 4th ed DnD style of both genders being split down the middle of any profession ever is sort of hard to swallow. As such, I sort of understand why they would call themselves the kingdoms of "man" as opposed to the kingdoms of "humans" and the kingdoms of "people" just sounds dumb. If there was a good term for humanity that sounded good and was gender neutral, I'd suggest we use that instead.

You might be interested in the Pathfinder Campaign Setting, a setting I like to push a lot. There is an Africanized setting featured prominently in the world (not just a far-off region), full of diverse civilizations. I don't know if you play PnP RPGs at all, but it should be interesting.

There still the Races of Man ... but maybe the Kingdoms ruled by Queens should be Called Queendoms

Or we could be all Gypsy and call ourselves Roma ... but I wouldn't want anyone to feel Gypped.

"Ba dum dush!"

They are not genetically speaking dwarves. All Races of Men are human. A different thing would be that one resembles what we could call dwarves in another game.

Yeah, yeah!

Bad Tolkien was too man-centric! He should have thought people in the years 2010s would want to rewrite History and give women a place they never had.

How many women in the armies of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, in medieval armies, with the conquistadors, in the army of Napoleon, during WWI and WWII?

How many women fought in plate armor waving swords?

We don't need neither stinkin' retro-feminism nor political correctness crap!

I ran human through the thesaurus.com and got mortal as the best alternative.  Now hear me out because this could work.  Mortal implies natural and Fallen means unnatural.

See, it fits into Elemental lore perfectly.

Can I suggest a radical solution? We instead have 'chaps'. There can be 'good chaps' and 'bad eggs'. Thereby circumventing all of the political correctness issues whilst being simply splendid terms to use in their own right.