Pronouns?

[reiichi]

From what I remember seeing of raw script, it's something along the lines of "if character is X, display text 'xxxxx'", and as I've been saying it's not just a matter of dropping in a single word in the right place bacuse there are so many different forms of gendered words or sentences.

It's not a matter of dropping in an external placeholder to determine whether Thancred tells you he's "quite taken with you" or simply "somewhat in awe". It's not placeholder text that determines how Magnai and Daidukul react to you. It's specific text at that place in the script which must check your character's gender and display the appropriate set of text boxes, but it's not just dropping pronouns alone into a generic script.

I can only imagine this "third party plug-in for custom preferences" had to do a lot of work to set up a custom system. It also presumably stores that information locally, and doesn't transmit it to other users, but if you want others to see your custom pronouns then that information has to be carried along with your character to every other person who sees you on their screen.

Using your first linked quest as an example,

Ahhh! I'm sorry, <If(PlayerParameter(4))>m-m-madam<Else/>s-s-sir</If>! No need to get angry, now! I-I have a problem, all right!? I was working it out with my mummy, and─uh, er, ah...

It's quite literally a template and placeholder system that generates the correct line based off your character's information. Just like any other templating system out there, you can have conditionals and branching which allows for a more "dynamic" text block display, which is what the game already does. Making an adjustment to check for some other character variable would be simple and like all other question dialog, handled completely client-side because the server doesn't care about pronouns. Naturally, the character's gender would still matter for things like equipping gear, but those checks do have to be validated by the server. There's no in-game dialog that checks the gender of your party members to my knowledge.

The plugin itself basically just overrides those local to the client variables and the text payload continues as normal. It'd be a lot more involved to inject something like "they/them" since that's not swapping a conditional if/else, but the general work needed to make these adjustments could be largely automated by the developers, I'd imagine as their scripting system likely allows them to already make those changes without having to hand-touch each one. (Just like how all the quests that mention race magically adjusted to Hrothgar and Viera).