Character pronoun and identity discussion

Re. Shimo from Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the character's gender was set to female because some venders (Amazon and Target) were used female pronouns for the "Shimo with Frost Bite Blast" toy (although apparently they forgot to change all the pronouns), but at least one other retailer (Smyths Toys UK) is selling the exact same toy while referring to Shimo with male pronouns in the official product description.

Also, the artist who designed the film's kaiju has also referred to Shimo with male pronouns on his X/Twitter account.

Edited by Arawn999 on Jan 19th 2024 at 9:35:15 AM

We shouldn't try to call this one until the film's out.

True, but people have been rather vehement about it both on X/Twitter and here.

It's impossible to make a call without the finished work.

True, but for the time being should some mention be made that the merch descriptions—as shown above—and Word of God statements are unreliable regarding Shimo's gender?

Yeah. Mention it's up for debate, but don't stick with anything consistent until the work is released to resolve this debate.

Bringing the SP character up again, but have we resolved Heather Swanson yet?

Tropers seem to leaning on using quoted she/her pronouns.

Scare quotes are certainly unusual, but there's no better option.

Done.

Speaking of South Park, there's another character identity I'd like to discuss, although pronouns aren't up for debate in this one. I speak of Token Williams/Token Black/Tolkien Black.

Because this isn't a deadnaming situation by any means, I'd assume the easy solution would be "main show uses Tolkien except when referring specifically to in-universe uses of Token, recaps and spinoff media use whichever name was active at the time", which is more-or-less how the pages already deal with things.

(And yes, naming the Token Minority "Token Black" was a bad idea out-of-universe, but that's beside the point.)

If the show is straight up gonna retcon even the previous episodes and say that his name was always Tolkein, then that's it, Tolkein is the name we're going with.

Token should only really be brought up when the show brings it up as a talking point.

Because of the unique nature of this as having nothing to do with gender or pronouns, we have a legitimate opportunity to form a precedent for Orwellian Retcon situations.

Basically: does his name being retroactively spelled as Tolkien in closed captions allow us to spell it that way in recaps etc., despite the fact it would ordinarily break the spoiler policy? I'm still leaning no, but I can be convinced otherwise.

It doesn't matter if it does break the policy. If the show is straight up retconning the episodes prior to the reveal by having the official captions call him Tolkein, then Tolkein is what we should go with for those recaps.

Edited by AudioSpeaks2 on Jan 22nd 2024 at 9:58:57 PM

Maybe on the specific matter of recaps, we should take it to the dedicated Recap Cleanup thread, as this has gone beyond the typical scope of this thread...

I'm generally against updating episodic works pages to account for later retcons, simply for comprehensibility reasons. A page about Book One in a series should be based on that book, not what Book Six says about it, and you shouldn't need to be familiar with the later book to make sense of the page for the former. And some works have enough of a Continuity Snarl that the principle can't be applied consistently anyway.

(It was worth considering for me that in this case the difference is probably inaudible when spoken, but I'm also not inclined to help artists whitewash problematic creative decisions rather than acknowledge them as they were published. It misrepresents the earlier episodes to pretend that the joke was different all along, and it seems better to simply mention it in a trivia entry like Inconsistent Spelling.)

List both imo.

I asked about this when it was first revealed. I'd say go with the retcon, but only for media that's able to be retconned. So something like an old offline video game can probably stay, but online video games (i.e. South Park: Phone Destroyer) and the various episodes that were released digitally (which is nearly all of them).

FWIW, the South Park wiki does retcon his name in previous appearances.

Well. It looks like an editor has settled the debate regarding Shimo's gender once and for all. Unilaterally. Without bringing it up here given the intense debate that'd been surrounding it, or that multiple retailers for the merchandise do use female pronouns for it.

Edited by Arawn999 on Jan 27th 2024 at 3:05:07 AM

I think we have enough consensus for Heather having quoted "she/her" as consensus that we can put it in the header

After watching Jujutsu Kaisen, I noticed that this wiki refers to Hanami as male. The anime gave them an Ambiguous Gender with a very feminine voice (at least in Japanese) contrasting their masculine-looking body. I don't remember Hanami being referred to with any particular pronouns at any point, but I might have missed something.

The fandom wiki page uses they/them. I've seen multiple Reddit users who are insistent that Hanami is male, but I'm getting the impression that this is because the manga translation made the decision to refer to Hanami as such and those readers are just used to that (correct me if I'm wrong). Others are saying that in Japanese, Hanami is left genderless.

I feel like defaulting to the translation is the best bet here.

We didn't do that with Crona from Soul Eater, though... mostly because it's generally agreed upon that them having referred to Crona with male pronouns was a "Blind Idiot" Translation move and IIRC the localization team said that they only used "he/him" because that was the convention back when it was translated, whereas now it's shifted to using "they/them".

Edited by Arawn999 on Feb 4th 2024 at 7:34:25 AM

What I'm trying to say is that the line for ignoring the work has to be set high, and if there's been no acknowledgement of an error, Hanami doesn't appear to reach that line.

I'm unfamiliar with JJK as a whole beyond a few scattered memes, so there may be a part of this I'm not getting.