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

[Mithron]

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.

Careful, having sense and logic will get you banned by today's societal immoral emotional standards. Their feelings matter more than what's correct or your feelings

[Boblawblah]

OP:


The spirit of Titanmen is alive and well.

[Troxbark]

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.

Taking a story as long going and personal as FF14 and then distancing the character by suddenly using ambiguous terminology would feel forced and unnatural. The worst part is you accuse me of being afraid when you yourself seem to be afraid of gendered language.

I find it absurd that you want want to change the game for 99% of players because you and a handful of others seemingly only found in NA have hyper-focused this one tiny and trivial personal issue. Even if I agreed with you, there's no way to find justification in spending the resources for this kind of change because of how small and regional the crowd is that's complaining about it.

[hynaku]

If they did that to me I would ignore them permantly.

[keichirou]

Found the 'phobe

like for real you deserve any single bit of backslash ...
typical woke nonsense , if youre not with me and agree to my ideologies you're a bigot and racist,phobicsomething and some other bs

[MAJRIS]

[SchwarzwaelderTorte]

I find it absurd that you want want to change the game for 99% of players because you and a handful of others seemingly only found in NA have hyper-focused this one tiny and trivial personal issue.

My brother in Hydaelyn, I'm sorry for not fitting the preconception you have of me once again, but I am European. Not even from the UK. In fact I speak 3 languages, 2 of which are a lot more gendered and less flexible than English in that regard, from a purely grammatical perspective. If anything, not being a native speaker highlights even more how easy it would be to simply tone down the gendering in English without making it uncomfortable for anyone. Because, as has been said here and elsewhere, the English language already accommodates for it and has for a long time, which is not the case in the 2 other languages I speak, for which there are still debates around new grammatical rules and pronouns.


More to the point, and this is not just in reply to Troxbark but to Gemina and others too, you're completely missing the argument I'm trying to make here.

You seem to be overfixated on pronouns, when, as I've explained in my first post, you can simply bypass the use of pronouns almost entirely and refer to the individual by other means, without shocking anyone, like Saints Row did (and I fail to see how the failure of the reboot invalidates anything I've said about the original series).
Even right now, in FFXIV, we have Loporrits who go by she/her, he/him and they/them, but you barely notice it, because they're mostly referred to by their names, or "furball" or whatever other characters call them in their respective quests.

What bothers me with the current gendering of the language used in-game is that, again, it is being excessively gendered in an unnecessary way. Again, it is not about pronouns. I do not hate Emmanellain for using she/her to refer to me, a woman who uses she/her pronouns. That would not make any sense.
But when was the last time you affectionately refered to a woman you know as "old girl"? I've never heard or read this saying in any other media or conversation, except maybe to an animal or a machine (which somehow makes it even worse!). What it is is that they've taken "old boy", which is a lot more commonly used to affectionately refer to men, and automatically gendered it without considering how off it sounds. This is what I mean by forced and unnatural.

I've taken "old girl" because it's the one that really struck me the most, but likewise you don't really hear "she's a woman of her word" or "Ah, [Player Name], you're just the woman I've been looking for.". Instead you'd rather say "she keeps her word" and "I've been looking for you/someone like you", or, to go back to my previous post, "you're just the person/adventurer/hero/miracle/savior/walking anomaly I've been looking for". This is because the original text is using idioms and phrases that are traditionally using "man" as an all-encompassing word (instead of person, invidual, etc), and then adding gender to it when it is used to refer to a woman, when it could simply.... not use those phrases to begin with. There are plenty of other ways to say the same thing, and it doesn't have to make any mention of gender.

Emmanellain could simply call us "friend" (maybe "old friend" is a little too much when we've barely met him) or "mate", or literally anything else that is appropriate for the situation, and still sounds natural.

The one exception to this overgendering would be "gentlewoman", because I think it's only used in the context of the Hildibrand questlines, and it fits with the tone of those stories.


Anyway, I've made my point and I don't really expect the reading comprehension in this thread to improve, no point spending more time on this.

[CaptainLagbeard]

The language in the game is definitely not excessively gendered. It's just regular English.

[AmorfaVex]

like for real you deserve any single bit of backslash ...
typical woke nonsense , if youre not with me and agree to my ideologies you're a bigot and racist,phobicsomething and some other bs

It's so ironic, isn't it?

Rather than seek acceptance of their own choices they want to force conversion to their own beliefs. It's fascist.

No one is begrudging them the option, instead they want to force their views on everyone else.

[Mosha]

What bothers me with the current gendering of the language used in-game is that, again, it is being excessively gendered in an unnecessary way. Again, it is not about pronouns. I do not hate Emmanellain for using she/her to refer to me, a woman who uses she/her pronouns. That would not make any sense.
But when was the last time you affectionately refered to a woman you know as "old girl"? I've never heard or read this saying in any other media or conversation, except maybe to an animal or a machine (which somehow makes it even worse!). What it is is that they've taken "old boy", which is a lot more commonly used to affectionately refer to men, and automatically gendered it without considering how off it sounds. This is what I mean by forced and unnatural.

I have, sure it's said by upper-middle-class British boomers but so is old boy. It's not commonly used anymore and I think the reason why the male-gendered version is more common is shows like Black Adder and Dad's Army, as soon as you say old boy this image pops into my mind:

what tbf suits Emmanellain to a tee.

Edit: I think Toff may be a better description than boomer