A Pride Of Pandas

Based on evidence, rather than expectation, I think it's fair to say I'm no longer that guy. The one who's willing to log in every last character on every account, just to grab a freebie for each of them, even though they know it will never be used. 

I know. It surprised me, too, when I found out but the facts are had to argue with. I keep posting about this, that and the other wonderful offer I'm going to be sure not to pass up and then that's exactly what I do.

Okay, I don't miss out completely. I'm not that far-gone, yet. If I've mentioned it on the blog, I always at least log in whatever character I'm currently playing, in whichever game it  happens to be, to blag the free loot and take a few screenshots. And usually I get as far as logging in any other characters I play, at least semi-regularly, as well. But my days of going  through every last character, on every server, on every account, something I really did do more times than I'd probably want to admit, do finally seem to be over.

I was thinking about that when I logged into EverQuest II a couple of days ago to do my Overseer dailies. (There will be a post about those very soon. Probably this week. Or a paragraph in a portmanteau post at least. I'm not sure I have enough to say for a whole post.) 

Daybreak are extremely good about posting links in the patcher to whatever's new and this time they had something up about Pride Month, so while the game was loading I clicked through and had a look at that. I found it very heartwarming, particularly the subtext. The phrase "Help show your unwavering support..." seemed to me to be particularly astute and well-judged.

Anyway, politics aside, Pride Month in EQII means free stuff, specifically free familiars, and no-one wants to miss out on those. Not only do they look great, they're really useful and you can never have too many of them

I am of the opinion, however, that it is at least theoretically possible to have too many rabbit familiars, which is what the Pride ones were for quite a while. The Darkpaw devs obviously agreed because a few years back they swapped from bunnies to lions (A Pride of them - geddit?). 

I wasn't as keen on the lions if I'm honest. The bunnies were there or thereabouts real size but the lions, by necessity, were a lot smaller than lions usually are and I thought they looked a bit chintzy. Still nice but not sure if the pun was worth it. 

This year, though, the devs have really done us proud (God, now they've got me at it...) with a whole new set of familiars to collect - red pandas. What a great choice!

Red pandas (Aka firefoxes) have to be one of the cutest creatures on the planet. They look like they were designed in the Jellycat testing labs (Although weirdly the actual Jellycat red panda doesn't really look that much like the real thing...) They'll make excellent companions for posing at the bank and the great thing about familiars in EQII is that you can have a hideously ugly blob equipped for the stats while overwriting its appearance with something much cooler  and better-looking from your collection.

Based on previous Prides I think we'll have pandas for three years at least. There are nine gender identities represented in the celebration and we get three different ones each year. 

I guess that does mean that if you have a particular identity you want to acknowledge or display support for, you might have to wait a couple of years before it comes around, which isn't ideal, but all the variations are available in the Store for free for the duration of Pride Month so anyone who has to wait for the right panda to arrive can at least make do with a bunny or a lion until then.

The familiars aren't supposed to be tied inextricably to specific identities in any case. The descriptions are intentionally vague but the colors, which are taken from the Pride flag, indicate the specific alliances. The EverQuest Show produced a very handy visual guide last year. I don't know if they plan to update it but I  guess they have until 2027, by which time we'll have the full complement of pandas.

The three on offer this year are Boundless, Trueheart and Proudheart which, according to the guide, are the colors of the bisexual flag, the transexual flag and the rainbow Pride flag itself. Given the current climate, I think I'm going to be traveling with the Trueheart beside me, if only to annoy J.K. Rowling (Not that that's hard to do. A lot harder not to, really.)

I am also going to make the effort to log in all my characters in EQII for which there's a realistic chance I might actually play them once in a while, so they can claim their three pandas. That means everyone on the account I pay for, so that's fifteen times I'm going to have to do it.

And a final note - I just equipped a panda for the first time to get some screenshots and whoever designed them (Ttobey I'm guessing.) went the opposite way from the lions. The new pandas look like they have to be at least twice life-size!

And a final, final note... since it fits the theme, here's the excellent and extremely NSFW new song from the great Kate Nash. She's flagged it as Age-Restricted so I don't know if it can even be embedded.

 GERM - Kate Nash

Apparently it can but you have to go to YouTube to watch it. Which I very much hope you will. It's not  so much a song as a lecture you can dance to and all the better for it. 

Sadly, I suspect the only people who'll see it will be those who already agree with what it has to say but you have to do what you can, don't you? Thanks to Darkpaw and Daybreak for doing their bit.

A Question Of Pride

I feel like this is the same post I wrote the same time last year but what the hey. Life moves in clades as Bruce Stirling once said. Or maybe he didn't. And even if he did, it's hardly the same thing. I don't know why I brought it up.

Life is one big circle, maybe that's what I mean. Oh, wait, now I sound like I'm in The Lion King. Which could totally work, if could come up with some smart way of connecting Pride Month with a pride of lions.

And why not? It's just what Darkpaw did, when they ran out of rabbits to drape in the rainbow flags of all orientations. They just moved on to lions and started working through the list all over again, three at a time.

This year's trio is Aceheart, Openheart and Freeheart, which I'm reliably informed "represent asexual, non-binary, and pansexual orientations". I think that's in respective order, although it's not always obvious which colors match up with which flags. The names can be a little vague, too, although Aceheart is clear enough. 

The lions, which are Familiars in the game, and therefore functional as well as meaningful, are all free for the asking in the EverQuest and EverQuest II cash shops, as are all those from previous years. Since Familiars are character-bound rather than account bound, you'd need to claim them all separately for each character you'd like to have them, but you have the whole month to do it and indeed a bit longer than that; they'll be in the cash shop until the 9th of July.

I've already picked mine up for my two most-played EQII characters and I'll be collecting them for all the others as and when I log them in. It's been a while since I last logged into EQ and even longer since I actually played but I'll probably make time to get the latest lions for at least a couple of characters before they disappear.

As I said, though, it's no big deal if you miss the opportunity this time around. The whole, rolling carnival will be back next year, I'm sure.

Which is both wonderful and also slightly worrisome, in a way. If you wanted a textbook example of how mmorpg culture has changed for the better in the twentysomething years I've been playing, you couldn't ask for anything more than the widespread acceptance and acknowledgment of difference that comes with incorporating Pride Month into the official event seasons of the games themselves.

It's a very far cry indeed from the genre's origins, when only the bravest of souls would dare to mention the possibility that anyone playing might be anything other than a straight, white male. Back then, you could easily find yourself on the wrong side of a vocally violent in-game mob, just for raising the possibility that anyone might want to express themselves as anything other than that expected norm. Even more disturbingly, you could sometimes find yourself on the wrong side of the moderators or GMs too, especially if you had the temerity to stand your ground.

It wasn't always that bad by any means but it was a time when many, quite possibly most, players seriously did not believe anyone played the games they liked other than people they considered to be exactly like themselves. Anyone playing a female character was assumed to be male because girls didn't play mmorpgs (Or any video games, really.) and any male who played a female character was deemed to have some nefarious motivation probably best not revealed.

Without getting all Polyanna about it, things are demonstrably better now. I'm just not entirely convinced that the best way of expressing, consolidating and cementing that positive change is to keep giving away free stuff. It seems a little odd, that's all.

But, hey, free stuff, right? I'm not gonna say no...

In fact, I'm so much not going to say no that over the weekend I logged into two games I'm not currently playing just to grab the Pride freebies I'd heard they were giving away. I have no shame when it comes to freebies. Plus, I do like to represent, at least in small ways.

I guess that's a cue for a quick aside before I get to talking about the loot I got. As one of those supposedly stereotypical straight, white males, I haven't had to spend a whole lot of time reflecting on either my gender or my ethnicity. Or so you'd think. Except, of course, I have.

I'll put the ethnicity angle to one side for now and try to concentrate on one thing at a time for a change. I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few years. It's something Mrs Bhagpuss and I talk about quite often, too. I'm about as sure as it's possible to be from the precarious vantages of hindsight and hypothesis that, had the cultural framework to support it been in place when I was an adolescent, I would have identified differently to the way I did.

How I would have identified is another matter altogether. Adolescence is a contradictory time of both radical confusion and rabid certainty. I might well have picked a flag and waved it proudly. I might also have found the fence a very comfortable place to sit. 

Now, at my advanced age and with my immense and hard-won wisdom (I don't need to insert an irony emoji here, do I?) I'm starting to realise the Q in LGBTQ+ could have some connection to me. It would be tantamount to cultural appropriation for me to lay claim to Q for Queer but I feel quite comfortable in adopting its alternate meaning - Questioning. 

Next time I have to fill out one of those government forms with a box to tick for gender and/or orientation I'm going to give it a bit more thought. You're never too old to learn new things about yourself - or I hope not, anyway.

While I figure out what questions I ought to be asking, let alone what the answers might be, let's get back to the plunder! ArenaNet is giving away a nice pair of wings in Guild Wars 2 for this year's Pride although unlike Daybreak they don't seem to be making much of a noise about it. I heard about it from MassivelyOP but I didn't get any emails from ANet and there's no mention of it on the news feed on the official website.

The wings are supposed to make you look like a macaw. What does that have to do with Pride? I had no idea, so I asked Bard, Bing and ChatGPT. Unfortunately, the rabbit-hole that led me down would trip the entire post and send it cartwheeling into a thicket of unsubstantiated assertation, so let's just say I was not able to confirm a relationship between macaws and Pride, assume ANet knows something I don't and take it there must be more to it than a mere coincidence of coloration.

The wings, which you can claim for free from the Gem Store under the Promotions tab, are account-bound and work either as a glider skin or a backpack, which makes it odd that you have to have at least Heart of Thorns enabled on the account to claim them. I tried to get them for my Core account but they don't even show up in the shop. 

There's a thread about it on the forums. It appears to be an issue with the Gem Store itself because there's a workaround in which you can get another account to gift the wings to a Core account and the receiving account is able to accept and use the item, which they can then equip as a backpack but not as a glider. Whether ANet will fix this before the offer ends I guess we'll just have to wait and see but it does seem a bit shortsighted of them to have allowed it to happen in the first place.

I've left the best 'til last, although since I led with it as the picture at the head of the post, I kind of blew any element of surprise right at the start.

For Pride '23, DCUO is giving away all ten orientation flags along with a really strong set of posters for your base. The posters feature various DC characters kissing, including Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy and Superman and... y'know, I'm not sure who that is. I really need to find out.

I took everything I could get my hands on and then realized my base is so overdecorated now there's barely any wall space left to hang new art. I eventually found an alcove I hadn't used yet so I put the posters up there but I may need to move them to somewhere more prominent later.

There are also some spectacularly colorful costumes that I haven't quite worked out how to get. I can't quite see myself wearing them so I can't pretend I made all that much of an effort. It's nice to have the option, all the same.

I'll be keeping an eye out for any more freebies that might turn up in other games I play, even if they're games I don't happen to be playing at the moment. I'm always willing to patch up for a good freebie. Pride lasts all month so there's plenty of time for more to show up.

Not that I'm suggesting free stuff is the point of Pride. No, not at all. I didn't even think it. 

It's just it'd be rude to say no when saying yes says so much more.

Hear The Roar

It was four years ago that I first reported on the arrival of free, rainbow-rabbit familiars in EverQuest II. They arrived as part Daybreak's contribution to Pride Month. 

I think it was the first time the company officially joined in the celebrations but it's hard to be sure. Reading Holly Longdale's Summer 2019 Producer's Letter again, I notice the section on the Pride Bunny giveaway begins "This year..." as though referring to an existing tradition but I can't find any mention of anything earlier, either on this blog, the wiki or anywhere else. 

Whenever it began, it's very much a tradition now. Bunny familiars are as much a part of an EQII summer as Ethereals and Panda Quests. Only there don't seem to be any Ethereal events this year and Yun Zi has moved his scavenger hunt to the autumn. And this year's Pride Bunnies are... lions.

Respect to Accendo once again for not making any of the obvious puns. I don't think I could have resisted the temptation. I can barely resist it now. 

This year's free familiars are:

Mithaniel's Proudheart Lion
Mithaniel's Trueheart Lion
Mithaniel's Boundless Heart Lion

I'm guessing we're going to cycle through the same sequence of lions as we did bunnies. If so, it answers the question I had about just how many gender and orientation variants Daybreak was prepared to acknowledge. 

I'm not going to get into the "What gender or sexual orientation does each name and color represent?" discussion again, except to say it still comes up occasionally in general chat. Such conversations have been gratifyingly respectfully, at least in my experience, but they rarely come to any firm conclusions. 

I'm very glad the many variations are in the game to give representation to those who claim them but I've been running around for years now with different bunnies on different characters and no-one's ever called me on any of them, which is just as well because I'd be hard put to say just what flag I was flying at any given moment.

Such ignorance might seem worrisome and there may be questions of cultural appropriation to be answered but I see it somewhat differently. As I said in my post four years ago, "In the nearly twenty years I've been playing EverQuest games, attitudes in MMORPGs to what we now call the LGBTQ+ community have changed almost out of recognition. The days when a single /ooc recruiting call for a "gay and lesbian friendly" guild would result in a torrent of abuse seem like something from deep history, thank the gods." That players can be confused by the symbolism but comfortable and unthreatened in their confusion seems like progress to me.

The choice of familiars rather than cosmetic pets is also significant, I think. I might be reading too much into it but it seems to me that there's a welcome element of gravitas and commitment involved in giving away items of considerable power and status rather than something that could be dismissed as "fluff". Not that there's anything wrong with fluff!

And these are some powerful familiars. This year's trio forms an advance guard for the forthcoming Season Nine, soon to be available in the cash shop. They have very nice stats as a result. They may only be "common" quality but they came as a handy upgrade to the familiar my Bruiser was using and he got that only a few months ago, a boss drop from a Visions of Vetrovia solo dungeon.

For that reason alone, I'd recommend any EQII player, however casual and infrequent, to take the time to log in and claim at least one Pride Lion on whatever character they think might get played this year. In fact, since there's no limit to how many you can have, you might as well get all of them for all your characters. That's what I'm going to do.

I tried out all three and the one I like the look of most is the one that appears least interesting in the store. The Proudheart Lion seems like it might be the plainest but it turns out to have a lovely, rainbow particle effect, brightly-colored highlights, glowing eyes and the rainbow flag right across its nose. 

Even typing that paragraph I realise I'm running into some pronoun issues. I note that Daybreak also choose to use "it" in the in-game descriptions, which is a luxury games featuring non-human characters can enjoy. It still feels slightly uncomfortable, somehow, all the same.

And that discomfort, like the comfort with confusion I mentioned above, is a good thing. It means we're aware of the issue. That in itself is a mark of how much things have changed and how far we've come. And also of how far we still have to go.

It's been a long road but it's heading in the right direction and we've been travelling together along it for longer than we sometimes remember. The Pride movement itself stems out of the Stonewall Riots. They happened more than fifty years ago but just a handful of years later, when I was a young teenager, the culture was already beginning to open up. It's been opening like a beautiful flower ever since.

There were setbacks. It's always two steps forward, one step back. Sometimes more than one. Every advance moves us closer to another challenge. And yet there are always those who just seem to get it.

I was taken by surprise a couple of weeks ago, when I came across this:

The lyrics seem so on point for the 2020s but it's a cover of a song Paul Westerberg wrote and performed with the Replacements almost forty years ago. I know I said there was plenty of that sort of thing going on in the 1970s but not quite like this. 

I can't believe I'd never heard it before. I'm really glad I've heard it now.

Say It Loud

In what now appears to be an annual tradition and an unofficial Norrathian holiday, this week saw the return of the Pride bunnies to the store. For a convenient payment of nothing whatsoever you can adopt three new technicolor rabbits:

• Erollisi's Flawless Heart Hare
• Erollisi's Boldheart Hare
• Erollisi's Sisterheart Hare

There's no rush. They're available for a few weeks from June 4 to July 8.  

As usual I was unsure which particular groupings the individual bunnies represented but Zhevally on the forums kindly identified them: "Going left to right in the photo, the colors match some of the flags for genderqueer, intersex, and lesbian."

These bunnies, from their very existence in the game to begin with to the way they're given away free as a signal of support and recognition of Pride Month, speak volumes to the way both the wider culture in general and the mmorpg genre in particular has changed and grown in the two decades since I first began playing EverQuest. 

Back then it was disturbingly common to see homophobic slurs in general chat. In play, issues of gender made many players so uncomfortable they found it difficult to react appropriately when a character turned out not to match the exact gender of the person at the keyboard. It's something that seems doubly unfortunate given the opportunities roleplaying games provide for exploring gender identity. 

As I believe I've mentioned before, one of the first friends I made in EQ became so unsettled when he discovered I wasn't, like my character, a woman, he made his excuses and left. He was very polite about it but we never hung out together again.

I'm sure such things still happen but I'm also sure they happen less often and, when they do, responses are more nuanced. These days there's a large guild in Guild Wars 2 by the name of Our Sanctuary whose tag is [LGBT]. They explain their name in their recruitment messages and hang their banner on keeps in WvW and I cannot remember the last time any of that triggered even a passing negative comment from anyone. That was not the case when they first started.

As I say, times have changed. This week I was playing through the third chapter of Living World Season Two, which originally debuted seven years ago. One of the talking points in the first and second season of Living World was the relationship between Marjorie and Kasmeer but at the time no-one was asking any questions about either the sexual preferences or gender identities of the Elder Dragons. On the contrary, as I was surprised to be reminded, all the dragons at that time were addressed with a neutral pronoun: all of them were "it".

A little more than half a decade later, during the Icebrood Saga, we learned Jormag is non-binary. In all conversations between NPCs, everyone uses Jormag's pronoun of choice: "they". I'm not actually convinced that Elder Dragons even conform sufficiently to our understanding of biological entities for this to be meaningful in terms of the lore but as a position statement by ArenaNet it's awesome.

Gender identity is something games developers are going to need to think about in the years to come, whether they like it or not. It's nice to see some have already started. I mentioned somewhat cryptically in yesterday's post that none of Crowfall's races are gendered. That depends on how you look at it. 

Outside of races assumed to be non-gendered, like robots or elementals, and excluding those games that controversially employ gender-locking, usually poorly-localized imports, the longstanding genre tradition has been for players to be given a choice between "male" and "female" for the characters they're going to play.

These days that's becoming an increasingly difficult tradition to maintain, far less justify. Why make it a choice of just two? As new games come on stream, artists and developers are going to have to think differentl. It seems ArtCraft already are.

In Crowfall you don't get to pick a gender. For  most of the races you get to pick a "body type". For the rest you get no choice at all. Once you've made your selection - or not - whatever gender you assign your character is up to you.

It's a neat solution although I can see how some people might see it as a cop-out. It does at least show someone's thinking about it, which at this transitional stage in the culture is perhaps as much as we can expect, if not hope. 

Mmorpgs are hardly the front line in the ongoing battle for gender equality and recognition but it's nice to see some progress all the same. 

And it goes without saying you can never have too many bunnies.

Familiar Feelings : EQII

Last year, when Daybreak gave away three bunny familiars as part of the Pride celebrations, I grabbed a set for all my characters. I've been running with bunnies all year. You can sometimes see one photobombing a screenshot. They do love the camera.

Each of the designs represents the colors on one of the Pride flags but I confess I haven't been paying attention to which is which. I did know what they all were once but when I came to write this post I realized I couldn't remember.

Luckily, this post at Gaminglyfe explains it nicely. Boundless Heart is the Bisexual bunny, Trueheart is Transgender and Proudheart wears the original rainbow flag of Gay Pride. Can't believe I didn't notice the bunnies' names are alphabetically matched! At least I won't forget again now I know, although really I should just be able to remember the colors.

This year's trio seem to have arrived with far less fanfare. I wouldn't have known the rabbits were back if I hadn't read Dreamweaver's forum post.

I picked up the new familiars on several characters yesterday and had a look at the descriptions. I'm guessing each of them represents something specific but I'm not sure I could say exactly what, although I kinda have some ideas. I've googled around but I haven't turned anything up.

Here are the descriptions and the rabbits. If anyone knows who each bunny is supporting, please share with the group!

Even without knowing exactly what they're about, you could hardly object to the sentiment. Unbiased, joyful, loving, these are some very friendly bunnies. Welcome anywhere, I'd very much hope. The stats aren't bad, either!

There's no rush to claim yours. They'll be hanging around the cash shop until the end of next month.