Yeah - if ever you want some truly depressing reading, there are a
lot of articles out there on how that trend perpetuates. It pretty much boils down to "guys make male-focused stuff like the stuff they grew up on because it's What You Do, women feel excluded, don't ask to play much, next generation of guys make stuff like they grew up on..."
[tangent] I found a hilarious picture the other day that gave me one of those lightbulb moments, though...you know how I said stupid woman-armour always makes me sad because y'know, a designer could have a
badass character with that kind of concept, but just went with interchangeable megatits like everything else?
This is what that looks like to women looking at it (
WARNING: probably NSFW and frightening to Americans). [/tangent]
The thing about Westerns, though, is that it's one instance where the ratio is slightly
justified: Victorian gender-segregation meant you
did get a lot of mining camps, ranches, and military units where women were rare. Hell, legend has it that's where the bandana code comes from - not enough ladies in mining camps for dances of the era to be done properly, so red bandanas danced the man's part and blue bandanas danced the lady's.
It
should be less pronounced and occasionally inverted in places with the long war (as it is in bits of Eastern Europe where all the men not ancient, teething, or dead in conflicts have gone elsewhere to find work) in the
Deadlandsverse, but there we run into the male player bias. So I will just have fun with our theoretically-unusual two-plus-males-to-one-female gang and period-accurate touchy-feeliness (think Sam and Frodo).
I hold as a personal standard that any collection of stuffed beasts is inferior unless it contains a lammergaier. Unfortunately they're very rare now, since as the name implies, folk used to think they ate sheep and shot them all, when in fact they're purely scavengers (they don't
just eat bones, though - they eat the post-vultured remains of carcasses
including bones. That is omni-nommage in action). As for weird-looking, I seem to remember your Thunderbird reference being its likely relative, the
Andean condor...alas, my Google-fu can't seem to locate pictures of a dominant male doing the wattle-puff thing. I still can't decide if a male thunderbird doing that would be crying-funny or utterly, utterly terrifying.
Evenki ones would definitely go
{{{GLAM!}}} like a red-hot iron
satyr tragopan, though.
