If someone were writing Ultima fan fiction, I considered whether it would it miss the point to alter the gargoyle race to have males and females. I decided against it after getting feedback from one of the original U6 devs who explained that gargoyles actually do have gender, but it's based on their sizes - small and large.
As of Ultima IX there is a single queen, similar to ants, and it turned out bad for the gargoyles. Is it conceivable the Time Lord may have changed their reproduction to prevent their destruction? What would be damaged thematically by this?
The main con of this I saw, was that it makes the gargoyles less "alien" in nature, and more human/easier to relate to, which could have been cool from a gameplay perspective, but could be bad from a theme perspective, since the whole point of ultima VI is "these people are SUPER different from us, yet we can live in peace."
It could be cool and add some cool dynamics, but in general I don't want to be like, the Michael Bay of Ultima who comes in and ruins the source material/legacy/themes just to add cool stuff, haha. Michael Bay/Todd Howard, how Howard "cool-ized" Elder Scrolls and Fallout, and may feel much was lost in that commercialization effort. And in truth there are more interesting ways to explore gender.
Here are some takes people had on the facebook UDIC:
So no matter what I do for Age of Singularity, somebody's gonna be mad! Also the concept image I'd shared (at the top of this devlog entry) made a few people think of this meme:
Ha, true. I agree gargoyle women shouldn't just be red women. It's true Stable Diffusion made the female really human. I wanted the female in that illustrative image to be more brutish and masculine, more like the male, almost indistinguishable as a female to us, but it was like pulling teeth. I even had to recolor the female to be red since stable diffusion made her caucasian standing next to this giant red monster gargoyle, haha. It reveals the limitations of the model for sure. I also agree genders/appearances etc. shouldn't be limited artificially. Rest-assured IF I went down this route, the female gargoyle design would probably not just be a red woman like in this concept image, haha. I often use generative tools like Stable Diffusion to create concepts of locations, characters, etc. and it's in the rare cases when the model starts struggling to give me what I want, that I start thinking I might have an actually unique and fresh idea in mind.
Then 'Manda Dee, an original Ultima VI dev, swooped in with some cool insights:
What's their genders? It's their sizes! They're hatched into two variants.
The smaller kind have non-functional wings. They don't "age" past a certain point.
Their minds remain more childlike.
...Or DO they?
Arguably, it's just that their culture infantilizes short people. It is much like most human cultures pressure women into a subservient and puerile mindset. Women are called "Babe" and "Baby" and endearments only appropriate to toddlers when in public. Today, we don't usually think much of it when male-gender people are called 'Baby' in public, but that used to be a huge no-no. So, anyways, Beh Lem isn't really a "boy". They're an adult. A garg that looks like them might be 300 years old.
The Garg genders do have physical differences. And, they carry biologically-influenced sociological implications.
For instance, Beh Lem has great big eyes. It makes the tall ones want to do things for them (like taking down a jar from a high shelf at the grocery store that Beh Lem can't reach). If the story of their society had continued as co-writer Herman Miller had imagined, much more of their species would have been revealed.
We had learned that the sex of some reptiles (notably crocodilians) is influenced by incubation temperature. Among bees, their gender is, in some cases, determined by whether or not they came from a fertilized egg (haploid drones laid by workers who turned fertile), and how much royal jelly they were fed (queens). It was conjectured (this is not canon) that the larger Gargs came from eggs anointed with a previous magical formula.
I would love to have seen this as a focus of a sequel.
There were probably jobs that required Little Ones to accomplish.
Their population was out of whack, with way too many Big Winged Ones.
Perhaps yet another gender used to exist: smaller but with large working wings, and the original dominant social faction.
The decisions probably would not have been made by some queen. Insect queens are pampered egg-machine slaves.
The large winged analogs of soldier ants were produced because they were at war. Having achieved greater numbers, the Big Winged Ones took over.
Having a sapient queen short-circuited the potential for a lot of cool story.
But that's easily fixed-- just get her killed off.
Then we might discover there's a potion that would let a Garg become a laying individual.
Or a potion that would grant a Little One wings and bigger body.
Or a spell that would change a Big One into Little, with accompanying protests that they're only doing it because they want somebody else to get jars down for them. Or a wand that transforms a Garg into a clutch of 50 eggs -- but kills them to do so.
----- And, as I said, gender is a social construct. After friendly contact with humans-- the genders will very likely flow over.
We would probably have Gargs who choose to identify as 'female' or 'male'.
Unlike babies, eggs are a lot of power for the biological investment. A chicken lays one a day; a queen bee lays 2000 in a day.
I'd like to see the Gargs come to grips with the implications of the above. 🙂
Sexy she-demon Gargs would still be on the table. So to speak."
Awesome. This shows gargoyles could be developed in really interesting and dynamic ways we haven't yet fully seen or explored in the Ultima games, so I'll be thinking about all that. Also, if the Underworld was breaking up, creating lots of hot volcanic activity, it could explain why there are more winged ones - the extra heat during incubation, throwing everything out of whack.
Here's the original fb UDIC post.
