🐟 The Ankoan and Jinyu Race Discussion Thread

[Rorrand-wyrmrest-accord (Rorrand)]

So, just to keep the conversation going, I thought I’d post a slight bit of investigation I did that may shed some light either on a crucial aspect of Ankoan culture or on how Ankoan NPCs are coded.

So, let me preface this by saying that the question of Hunter Akana’s gender has probably bothered me much more than it should. The Horde’s bodyguards feature 2 distinctly male gilblins and one female one, so it stands to reason that the Alliance would have a similar distribution. Of course, gilblins are overtly either masculine or feminine at first glance whereas ankoans are not, so the next best way we can determine an ankoan’s gender is by listening to their voices. Voice lines have traditionally been the only way to distinguish gender in multiple races where sexual dimorphism is nonexistent.

Now, Akana’s been a bit of an interesting beast. While the other two voices, Bladesman Inowari and Farseer Ori, have distinctly male voices, Akana’s has always come across as female. It is expressly clear that Akana’s voice actor is a woman. But then we have to remember that, in the PTR, Akana’s description when clicking on the campfire used male pronouns to describe him, not female ones. This was removed when 8.2 went live, but not necessarily because it was a mistake. The character descriptions for all bodyguards were rewritten and dramatically shortened, and now none of them have any references to any gender whatsoever.

So I started looking around for any kind of official reference to Akana’s gender and I came across a nifty macro that I’ll post below;

/run local genderTable = { "neutral or unknown", "male", "female"};DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage('Target is ' ..genderTable[UnitSex("target")] .. '.');

This macro seems to draw from a value located in an NPC’s “gender table.” Now, not every NPC in the game has one, so if you use this macro while a critter like a frog or a prairie dog is targeted you will almost always get the “neutral or unknown” response. But if you use it on a player it will, with 100% accuracy, return with the gender value that matches what the player selected in the character creation menu. E.g. female night elves will always be “female,” male orcs will be "male, " etc. etc. You can also use this on important NPCs. Jaina is female. Genn is male. Shandris is female. It’s great to have that confirmation. So what we can conclude is that, in any race with visible sexual dimorphism, this macro will return with the gender value that corresponds to what their model is already telling you.

But what about those pesky races that share the same model regardless of their gender? Well, at first I thought these races wouldn’t have gendertable values at all. After all, even though some sethrak we’ve come across are voiced by women, the fact that female sethrak exist would be more of a lore point rather than something the game itself would need to identify, so why would they need to have gendertable values at all?

But, to my surprise, I was pretty wrong.

I tested the macro on four androgynous races; the jinyu, the tortollans, the sethrak, and the ankoans.

Let’s get the jinyu out of the way; every single NPC at pearlfin village returns a ‘male’ value. Literally every single one, from the named NPCs to the nameless grunts. They’re all male, which lines up with what we know about them because we were never presented with any Jinyu that looked or sounded female during the Pandaria campaign.

Now let’s talk about the tortollans. The vast majority are male, but there are a few important figures that pop up in lore that are distinctly female. Running around the tortollan camp in Stormsong reveals that the vast majority of the guards and NPCs posted have a gendertable value of male, with a few that came back with the “neutral or unknown” value. However, Scrollsage Nola was the sole individual who returned a “female” value when the macro was used. I then used the macro again at their outpost in Zuldazar, where there are a more diverse cast of npcs and vendors. There, every NPC that used a feminine voice returned a value of “female” for their gender table. There were a few males that returned the “unknown or neutral” value, but, by and large, the same rule applied to them as well.

The sethrak cast of NPCs is very small, but suffice it to say that Vorrik came back with a male value. Additionally, every sethrak npc at the Terrace of the Devoted with a voice line, such as those that guard the entrances, similarly had a gender value that matched masculinity or femininity of their voices. But here’s the really interesting thing; there are a whole bunch of sethrak vendors inside the terrace itself that have no voice lines whatsoever; you click them, you buy from them, and yet they remain totally silent. Yet still none of them returned a “neutral or unknown” value of their gender table, which would have indicated a lack of importance for that value in their situations. Yet they too had a nice healthy mix of males and females, even though there’s no way to otherwise detect that in a player’s experience. Even the hostile “faithless” sethrak currently at war with the devoted just outside the terrace have specific male or female gender values. While the tortollans had a few individuals that returned the third gender value, the one and only sethrak that did so was the avatar of sethraliss, and lorewise that sort of makes sense. This means that, thus far, the Sethrak, even moreso than the tortollans, are a race that is specifically coded to have two distinct genders, although the models they use don’t necessarily represent that.

And now the moment of truth. The ankoans.

So, what gender is Hunter Akana? … Unknown or Neutral. That’s a bit anticlimactic. But wait… so is Bladesman Inowari! And every vendor over by the training ground, and the PVP and pearl traders inside the spire, and the guardsmen walking around the camp.

Yes, every ankoan NPC, regardless of their name, service provided, and voice file, returned a “neutral or unknown” value for their gender table. Every ankoan… except for two; Blademaster Okani and Farseer Ori. And, wouldn’t you know, these are the only two ankoans in lore that have been described with male pronouns in quest text (in the case of Ori) or by dialogue from Akana (in the case of Okani). Other “male” ankoans were only ever assumed to be male based on their tones of voice, but there’s no dialogue that indicates this to be the case. And since ankoans are based off the jinyu I would imagine that, if the gender value was either overlooked or irrelevant, ankoan npcs would likely all read as “male” regardless of the voice files used just like the jinyu are.

Ok, so this was a huge summary of me just running around spamming a macro and invading the privacy of innocent NPCs. Can anything be confirmed based on this? Well, the only thing we know for sure is that the ankoans are coded in such a way that makes them stand out from any other androgynous race I’ve tested so far. The fact that only 2 npcs in the entire ankoan camp come back with “male” values is a very interesting curiosity. From this, there are a few possibilities we can draw.

1. Ankoan voices are so androgynous that certain parts of the design team are unsure of their true gender. While quest text writers make distinctions on the gender of at least a handful of ankoans, the people who actually mess with the coding of other NPCs have nothing else to go on, so for all instances outside of Ori and Okani they just leave the gender value blank.

2. The ankoans are the first truly “gender fluid” race in WoW (get it, because they’re fish? heheh) with gender intentionally being undefined for the vast majority of the population save for Ori and Okani who choose to identify as male.

3. From a design perspective, ankoans are unfinished and, in the future, will have more clear masculine and feminine characteristics at which point their gender value will be added. This would likely happen closer to potential date of playability.

Any one of these possibilities might say something interesting about how ankoans are treated from either a lore or a gameplay perspective.

Thank you for indulging me in my madness.