Non-binary option for characters, please?

[KisaiTenshi]

I can already anticipate how “controversial” and “SJW” this post will be received by some as (God, when society in about 100 years from now looks back on this and how the word “SJW” is used as a slur for people who ask for more options of self expression, they’ll facepalm so hard.), but as a non-binary tax and sub-paying adult human, would there be any way you could (Square, that is) implement a gender neutral option, maybe if not on the character creation screen, then tucked away in the settings somewhere? (To avoid offending many of those who cry at the sight of *gasp* more than 2 genders!)

I look forward to the original remarks about Attack Helicopters and god knows what else being used as an argument against more options, but to the MANY gender-nonconforming players of this game (I’m sure you’ve all seen how many LGBT* FC’s there are), even just having one catch-all option outside of the gender binary would be so wonderful. I spend an ungodly amount of money on Fantasia due to being pretty fed up of being referred to as male or female constantly in basically every cutscene. (I probably shouldn’t have said that, you’re making a killing off me Square, I’ve probably funded all the expantions at this rate) What do you all think? Dangerous question to ask online, especially here, but I’ll risk it.

Gamers are sociopaths when it comes to treating people with respect, so just remember that any perceived slight at this suggestion is because they have a closed or empty mind.

While this is a nice ideal, the pragmatic limitations are on the technical side - and are probably the biggest reason your request is unlikely to see fruition. From a technical standpoint, options are anything but free. Particularly when it wasn't in the original design spec. (Perhaps in the next FF MMO?)

This is probably not too trivial to implement, it just would just make things hugely confusing for the non-English locales since English doesn't have gendered language where as French is rather heavily gendered. If we were able to create a truely "gender neutral" character at creation, ie, women characters with no chest/butt, allow facial hair options, men characters with ... you know what they're probably close to neutral enough without adding a bust and butt slider. That's still a trivial tunable, rather than creating entirely separate gender-specific gear models.

The reason people ask for such things is because they want a character that represents themselves as they are rather than playing a game with a fixed set of options. It's only been relatively recently that any MMO even allows for gay marriage, so games are just a decade behind where society finds things acceptable.

The trouble really is that NB, TG, and various other agender terms is that there is zero agreement on anything but singular "they" for language. If you don't know what someone is, you dehumanize them by calling them "it", and insult them by using any gender-determinate language, especially after they tell you what they want to be called. Voice chat adds an entire additional layer of sociopathy, and it ultimately makes any MMO far more toxic for it. If it were possible for the game to do voice analysis and then turn that into it's own character-specific speech synthesis, I think that would be removed as a toxicicity barrier.

Anyway I don't see any changes in this regard happening to FFXIV, not because of lack of interest, or developer inertia, but that there just isn't really any need for it, since the underlying motive (people identifying as agender, non-binary, transgender, etc) for it hasn't reached a similar level of acceptance in conventional media.

https://hornet.com/stories/ap-non-bi...nder-pronouns/

But now, the AP Style Guide is permitting the use of singular “they” for people of non-binary gender.

The style guide now reads:

In stories about people who identify as neither male nor female or ask not to be referred to as he/she/him/her: Use the person’s name in place of a pronoun, or otherwise reword the sentence, whenever possible. If they/them/their use is essential, explain in the text that the person prefers a gender-neutral pronoun. Be sure that the phrasing does not imply more than one person.

So the easiest way for the game to adapt, is to really just do what it's been doing all along and either referring to the WoL as WoL or the player's name, depending if it's a voiced or unvoiced scene, and use the players name instead of a pronoun even when they're being referred to in third person or not-present.

Retrofitting the existing Engish dialog is probably not that trivial, but there's probably a lot of flavor text that goes (player's pronoun) where it can be replaced with (player's name) except where someone has specific kind of 'tic that was phonetically localized. I'm not sure if there are any, but I know that some text in the game is presented different depending on your race, gender or GC.