[Lore Discussion] Commanders' Genders and the use of "He".

Hence my post:

Just fix the language.

Sometimes a toaster is just a toaster, and you know what they say, all toasters toast toast.

Funny that in second person pronouns this problem is tolerable enough.

"I might be wrong, but I don't believe English is very good at gender neutral language, he's simply not setup to handle it..." ^^ Nothing strange going on here!

That's an interesting perspective. I agree having token women personalities wouldn't be ideal, but it would be better than none.
Video games are part of our culture, and the Lore is part of culture. Politics pertains to everything in daily life. These things are inescapable.
Yes it's a video game about blowing up planets.
An awesome video game - a popular video game. An influential video game that's going to be played for years to come. Lots of people are going to read the Lore.

I'm not really for shoehorning, I agree with you there.
That said I think there are more productive avenues than 'he' (as per my OP) like 'It' and 'They' which would actually fit in with what these machines are, their multi-faceted personalities and search for identity and communal purpose.

If I called my Toaster "Invictus" and referred to it as a "he", personifying it, would that be gender neutral?

This is awesome. I was thinking last night about ways gender neutral pronouns could be combined in order to emphasize these machines' fractured personalities/communal identities. I may write some stories.

Also I just remembered something - Space Romans.
The designers clearly had knowledge of/contact with gendered society.

I think one way out of this would be to have the robots as naturally gender neutral and innocent, and then as they recover memories they adopt gendered personalities and competing ideologies. Hence the "Roman" Leader is a man due to the patriarchal martial tradition of his memories.

Remember I mean gender, not sex.

There's also the Immersion argument:

One would think that after thousands of years, machines breaking the boundary of gender to include not just the living "he" and "she" and the inanimate "it", but would figure out a way to address AI Gods by some other way than "he".

I'm not a fan of Orion's arm, but as a world building project thingy it worked out some interesting issues. Like, how to address AI Gods.

I think that talking about "machines" is almost derogatory. they're essentially living beings other than the stuff they're made of. Perhaps Alife or Vec would work?

I've got a few ideas I need to think through.
Toying with the idea of "One" and "Nothing".
I have essays to do but it certainly be really fun to write and explore this in some fiction. Probably over the weekend

I love that you got this flame war started *sarcasm*.
My sister plays the game and she has no problem referring the robots to "he" or "him". In the case of Red vs. Blue they referred to the tank as being "female" which made her more humorous than anything. We call items of beauty "she". So am I going to say that all cars need to be named "he" to make them "gender neutral?". I love cars so I call them "she" because they are a thing of beauty. War machines are usually called "she" or "her" because they have sentimental value to them.

I am all for women in the military, but when it comes to this game I will always call my commander "he" because I am a guy. Likewise my sister refers to her's as being "she" or "her." I don't give a crap about the lore and I don't think a majority of the player base does (sorry for the bold statement). We just want a good game, and an enjoyable experience.

If I wanted a plot, I would go to a movie.

Call them females all you want I will still refer to them as "he or him"

Ain't feminism great?

What is even your point?

all three quotes have absolutely nothing to do with the thread

Are men not allowed to be beautiful then? *pouts* :'(
Calling something 'She' because you find it beautiful puts women on a pedestal as beautiful by nature. What if women don't want to be beautiful? What if they want to sit around in their underwear farting and smashing planets?

That's cool, I agree with you that most people aren't fussed.
But that we as players can call Commanders both male and female means that they shouldn't only be called "He" in the Lore, because the Lore is prescriptive and will be used as a reference for explaining mechanics in-game.

Clearly we ascribe our own genders onto them.
But "He" is not neutral as many have claimed here.
"It" is gender-neutral, and therefore your sister would not need to be contradicting the Lore when she referred to the Commander as "she" if these Commanders were (in their personality-less states) referred to as "It".

Plots aren't just for movies. TV, Novels, Radio, Video Games, hell even Board Games. These can all make use of a storyline. I mean have you played 'The Last of Us'? *weeps*
One of the most engaging things about TA was the narrator and plot.

I ejnoy the seinfeld analogy of women and men. The male body is a work horse and the female body is a thing of beauty. I have no interest in debating the idea that men and women are 100% the same in everything, it's insane.

The "romantic languages" default objects as masculine in most cases.
I see no problem with the lore working the same way, even if you like to play as hot pink.

I agree. They are not the same.

The male body evolved for hunting, the female body evolved for bearing babies and feeding them.
There is potential for beauty in both those things. Beauty is not a blanket concept.

Nor should we think of men as workhorses, that's degrading.

There are few objects in English which are referred to as "He". I don't call my computer "He", I don't call a female cat "he". I don't call Siri "he".

Besides which, the Commanders objects. They're sentient life forms.

It's like referring to humanity as "he" because we were 'mankind' once upon a time.
And even then, these Robots are referred to in the singular - not as a species.

wtf thread name

uwotm8