What if: Starting with Dawntrail, everyone starts referring to the WoL as they/them?

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

How would you react to your WoL being referred to with gender-neutral pronouns?

Saints Row (the original series) managed to never use gendered pronouns from the 2nd to the 4.5th title, and it's worked just fine. I'm pretty sure most players never noticed.
It would even make less work for the localization teams :^) (at least in English)

And it would finally free us from extremely weird gendered phrases and idioms where every instance of "man" is replaced by "woman" (as in "a dog is a (wo)man's best friend"), which completely sounds out of place and reads wrong, the biggest offender to me being "old girl" by far. "Old girl" is the reason I will never like Emmanellain. I'll reconsider my opinion of him when he stops calling me that.

Saints Row's trick is to very rarely rely on pronouns themselves, and instead copiously use "Boss", "the Saints", etc, and here "man/woman" could quite easily be replaced by person, adventurer, wanderer, warrior (of light), fighter, legend, hero, friend, partner (Estinien does call us "aibou" 相棒 in Japanese), comrade, clown, anything goes.

If a GTA-like in which you run around with a dildo bat managed to do it without hurting anyone's feelings, I'm sure a fantasy MMO can too.

[Mosha]

snip

Right, but FFXIV is a established MMO with some people's WoLs going back a full decade, what have very well established genders. So I'm pretty sure it would indeed upset a lot people if the game forced they/them pronouns on to their WoL suddenly. Would upset as a trans woman who uses female pronouns at least.

[Troxbark]

Saints Row (the original series) managed to never use gendered pronouns from the 2nd to the 4.5th title, and it's worked just fine. I'm pretty sure most players never noticed.
It would even make less work for the localization teams :^) (at least in English)

And it would finally free us from extremely weird gendered phrases and idioms where every instance of "man" is replaced by "woman" (as in "a dog is a (wo)man's best friend"), which completely sounds out of place and reads wrong, the biggest offender to me being "old girl" by far. "Old girl" is the reason I will never like Emmanellain. I'll reconsider my opinion of him when he stops calling me that.

Saints Row's trick is to very rarely rely on pronouns themselves, and instead copiously use "Boss", "the Saints", etc, and here "man/woman" could quite easily be replaced by person, adventurer, wanderer, warrior (of light), fighter, legend, hero, friend, partner (Estinien does call us "aibou" 相棒 in Japanese), comrade, clown, anything goes.

If a GTA-like in which you run around with a dildo bat managed to do it without hurting anyone's feelings, I'm sure a fantasy MMO can too.

This game clearly isn't made for you then.

I'm a guy. I play a female character. The NPCs refer to me as she/her and some random players have refereed to me a she as well. Like any rational person, I don't give a shit. It's really that easy.

If you refocused the energy you spend going out of your way to be offended by something so trivial, you'd be cleaning your garage to fit your 4th or 5th super car by now.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Saints Row (the original series) managed to never use gendered pronouns from the 2nd to the 4.5th title, and it's worked just fine. I'm pretty sure most players never noticed.
It would even make less work for the localization teams :^) (at least in English)

And it would finally free us from extremely weird gendered phrases and idioms where every instance of "man" is replaced by "woman" (as in "a dog is a (wo)man's best friend"), which completely sounds out of place and reads wrong, the biggest offender to me being "old girl" by far. "Old girl" is the reason I will never like Emmanellain. I'll reconsider my opinion of him when he stops calling me that.

Saints Row's trick is to very rarely rely on pronouns themselves, and instead copiously use "Boss", "the Saints", etc, and here "man/woman" could quite easily be replaced by person, adventurer, wanderer, warrior (of light), fighter, legend, hero, friend, partner (Estinien does call us "aibou" 相棒 in Japanese), comrade, clown, anything goes.

If a GTA-like in which you run around with a dildo bat managed to do it without hurting anyone's feelings, I'm sure a fantasy MMO can too.

Well, Saint's Row's "boss", they call the player character by title rather than a name or anything... The equivalent for XIV would be just everyone constantly calling the player character "Adventurer", or later on as "The Warrior of Light/Darkness" by people who actually know the character.


How well would the dialogue flow if they replaced every instance of he/she or him/her with "The Warrior of Light"

[Theodric]

Saint's Row, eh? How did that game fare with its latest attempt at a reboot to appeal to 'modern audiences'?

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

This game clearly isn't made for you then.

I'm a guy. I play a female character. The NPCs refer to me as she/her and some random players have refereed to me a she as well. Like any rational person, I don't give a shit. It's really that easy.

If you refocused the energy you spend going out of your way to be offended by something so trivial, you'd be cleaning your garage to fit your 4th or 5th super car by now.

My brother in Hydaelyn I am a woman. I just don't want my own gender being thrown into my face in ways that make the dialogue, the literal text, unnatural and forced, when there's really no need for it to begin with.

My point with Saints Row is that the lack of gender doesn't feel forced at all (which is what you (plural) seem to be afraid of in this thread), and the dialogues roll really smoothly.

[reivaxe]

My brother in Hydaelyn I am a woman. I just don't want my own gender being thrown into my face in ways that make the dialogue, the literal text, unnatural and forced, when there's really no need for it to begin with.

My point with Saints Row is that the lack of gender doesn't feel forced at all (which is what you (plural) seem to be afraid of in this thread), and the dialogues roll really smoothly.

I've played a number of games that do this, and it always feels awkward, gross and lazy AF. It makes me feel disconnected from my character because the world just treats em as some amorphous blob instead of their own person. It's also not how people talk in RL, people don't go outta their way to avoid referring to you as he/ she unless you're living in some Deep Blue city and demanding they use the wrong pronouns for what they clearly see. Really makes the dialog feels wierd AF.
And again, it's lazy AF because the devs only have to record 1 line over 2.
So when it's forced like that it doesn't even feel "political", it just feels lazy bones af. "They did this to avoid recording more lines ... lazy *&^%s! "

[Supersnow845]

Like I said it should be an option if you are roleplaying a non binary character but I just don’t see it as a big deal, like I’m not gonna get annoyed when people can (and do) refer to me as my avatars name, do people really think my real name is Andreas, of course it isn’t, am I gonna get annoyed that someone in VC called me Andreas, hell no I prefer you call me Andreas in VC Because that’s what my in game name is

[Denji]

i find this subject fascinating because not every language has gendered pronouns while others are extremely strict about it and in the end all i care about is whatever option allows me to maximize my laziness
so in this instance idgaf about gendered pronouns and idk why anyone would care if it switched to they/them. like who cares. its literally a nothingburger. the ghost of english past isn't gonna haunt you and even if it did you'd be so far down in queue because shakespeare himself didn't give a fk about whether or not singular they/them was correct or not and used it anyway.

[Gemina]

My brother in Hydaelyn I am a woman. I just don't want my own gender being thrown into my face in ways that make the dialogue, the literal text, unnatural and forced, when there's really no need for it to begin with.

It frustrates me to no end how people on this side try to reverse the logic like reflecting it off a mirror. Forcefulness is committed when the subject matter is inappropriate, not the other way around. If you and/or your character is female, it will never be inappropriate to be referred to as she or her. It is simply correct. Forced is what happens when people are expected to refer to someone as he or him, when they are clearly a female. This is not the appropriate context. This is not the appropriate pronoun. If you are a female, and you get offended when someone refers to you as she or her, that is your problem.

I never played Saints Row, and to be frank I don't care. It's not even a matter of most people being conditioned to think a certain way. It's a matter of reality. It's knowing that true north exists. Anytime that the dialogue in FFXIV has referred to my character as she or her, not even one time has it felt out of place. And the reason for that is because my character is a female.