Quote Originally Posted by Sigma-Astra View Post
Do you not realize...
Yet you decided to be personally offended that I posted anything and when you added nothing to the conversation for that entire page of the thread. My point, since you didn't actually read it was that this thread is troll bait, and was definitely straying off topic into the typical trolling nonsense at the time I posted, so just skip or ignore the posters that aim to derail it.

Quote Originally Posted by Iscah View Post
I realise people have strong opinions, but it still boggles me how spiteful some of these posts are.

Even if you disagree with the idea of it yourself, you can still respect that the other person truly thinks of themself as the gender they claim to be, and address them in the way they ask to be addressed.

I also find it very hard to believe that people would "choose" to identify in a way that opens them up to such abuse, if they didn't really believe it to be true.
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People are spiteful about this, because they go "oh no, real life politics in my entertainment, ew, get it away", despite all story telling is political by nature. Stories tell us about people who do bad or stupid things and how they became better people by realizing the err of their ways, or they go die on that hill as the big bad. Even a story where the protagonist ends up worse off in the end, doesn't come about without the protagonist learning to be better in some way. Everyone is the hero of their own story.

Gender neutral pronouns, or handling English dialog in such a way is not really that hard, and people who believe it's hard are just grumpy that they lose a way to tease people because now it's an insult to not consider the gender of the speaker as possibly being neutral or ambiguous. Think about how masculine and feminine behaviors are called out for being frivolously not-normal when done by someone who certainly does identify as one gender, it just happens to not be the gender they present as normally.

That's the entire thing about NB. It's less about mis-gendering like it would be for trans, and more about not assuming any specific gender in stories and conversations when none is necessary. It's a relatively recent thing, and there will be pushback because people think it's silly, until they get shouted down for not taking it seriously. It's also much less excusable, because singular 'they' has always been usable and is existing in English, and doesn't make conversations awkward unless the person is present, because then you should be using their name anyway.

From a gaming perspective, the easiest way to write dialog where the protagonist can be any gender is to use the gender neutral language by default, and never use a specific pronoun except where the speaker would never could never use it because they speak in a certain formal way (eg "My Lady", "Master <family name>", "Madam", "Sir") or diminutive way (-chan and -tan suffixes with all names, including themselves.) You often see this in subtitles in foreign language media where someone refers to themself by their own name/nickname instead of "I", where they really said it with diminutive gendered language. In that language it's supposed to come off as cute, but in English it is anything but.