Character pronoun and identity discussion

Okay, Amphibia has a supporting character Terri, who's pronouns weren't given but had a feminine appearance so was referred by she/her pronouns.

The other day Marcys Journal A Guide To Amphibia was released and Terri shows up a few times and is consistently referred with they/them pronouns in it.

Permission to change pronouns?

Voting first, which I'll say for now.

This sounds like a character officially being they/them to us.

I don't see much room for ambiguity here, another vote for they/them.

Edited by Bisected8 on Dec 8th 2022 at 9:15:22 AM

To They/them

They/them

It's a straightforward

For they/them.

They/them

I'm assuming you mean by fans, and not officially?

Okay, so Terri has Nice Girl in their character folder, what do I do to it?

Yes

Edited by Agentofchaos on Dec 8th 2022 at 5:09:40 AM

They/them, then.

You can change that to Nice Guy, since it being the actual name of the trope makes it more neutral.

Well, I'd just use Nice Guy as it's the main trope name and trope names don't reflect character gender in any way.

Anyways. I'll add Terri to the pinned post.

Edited by MacronNotes on Dec 8th 2022 at 5:13:55 AM

re: Ranboo— I havent seen or read this roleplay, so if there's other evidence that hasnt been mentioned then this comment can be disregarded. However, if there really is no ambiguity in canon, then per Toaster precedent we need to use the pronouns present in the original.

I think my overall rule of thumb would be— if a modern, trans-friendly reader with no outside information read the story, (most ppl in this thread, i assume) would they be likely to question the gender and/or pronouns used in the story? It doesn't sound like they would in this case

Edited by Tremmor19 on Dec 8th 2022 at 1:29:09 PM

Side note— I would like to bring up the manga Claudine, specifically because it provides a precedent which might be worth noting for future reference. This is an older story, published in the 70s. The title character is unambiguously a trans man— he presents as male, clearly stated multiple times that he is "really a boy" and that he views himself as male, and uses a male name. Despite this, the narrator uses female pronouns. (the narrator is also a character in the story, so in theory the character could be the one making this error, but I get the impression at least some of this is due to uncertainty from the author).

Our page uses he/him pronouns and has since before this thread was created, which I think is the correct choice, and I don't anticipate any disagreement there. The reason I'm bringing it up is because it could be considered precedent for using pronouns that are neither used in the story nor confirmed by Word of God— in particular, this would apply to other works that come from a notably different cultural context (in this case, 40+ years old and also translated)

Edited by Tremmor19 on Dec 9th 2022 at 9:01:55 AM

We shouldn't invent pronouns out of whole cloth, barring the occasional "they/them for no better option" situation. We should follow whatever the official English translation used.

Edited by bwburke94 on Dec 9th 2022 at 5:56:54 AM

I mean, normally I'd agree with you, but in the case of Claude, an unambiguous trans man, that doesn't make much sense.

The problem is that creating an exception to "follow the work", even in an extreme case such as this one, may lead us down the slippery slope.

Does anyone here actually have access to the English translation? Maybe we have an out, if the narrator admits they got it wrong in-universe.

A slippery slope to what, exactly?

The line between Ambiguous Gender Identity, Trans Audience Interpretation, and Death of the Author. At what point can we "ignore the work" and change a character's pronouns?

The easiest solution for Claudine... is to simply call it an in-character error, because everyone out-of-universe agrees Claude is a boy.

Yeah, if I remember the narrator himself (Claudine's doctor) even agrees that Claudine is indeed a man in spirit if not anatomy.

I thought the precedent that we were following is that we use whatever pronouns/gender that the character themselves uses.

Especially since there are a lot of works out there, whether out of ignorance or malice, that misgender/deadname the trans characters that the authors themselves wrote.

And i feel like that would just be reinforcing/legitimizing transphobic narrative choices and talking points if we were to blindly follow authors' choices to misgender transgender characters.

I think whatever we use for this example, it's fair to have a note about the writing, since it doesn't sound hostile but it is very much a product of its time

We're all in agreement, then. All we need is to reword the note to make the situation clearer.

That makes sense, in this case that's clearly he/him as well. unambiguously trans characers in older works are uncommon, but "characters who prefer pronouns other than those assigned to them" is much easier standard to fulfill, and doesn't require us to debate anyone's true identity

At any rate there's tons of precedent for using modern language that the author did not use (for example we have never had a rule that we cannot refer to characers as native American when the author referred to them as "Indian").

Edited by Tremmor19 on Dec 9th 2022 at 4:46:52 AM