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Unless a trope is explicitly about one particular gender, like Damsel in Distress, I don't see anything wrong with using neutral pronouns.
On the other hand, is it really has to fix? I think it's first come first serve (like UK spelling vs US spelling), but I might be wrong.
If the trope isn't gendered, gendered language is just factually incorrect. The "neutral he" is no longer commonly used.
Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.
Alright then, I will do it myself.
Edited by Kuruni
^^ That's... just plain not the case. Formal writing often uses "he or she," "he/she," the "singular they," or consciously alternates between a generic "he" and a generic "she," but the exclusive use of the generic "he" is still very common in informal writing, and it's hardly been banished from formal writing either.
Personally, I'm a fan of using the singular "they" myself, but I'm an even bigger fan of not being overly prescriptivist about how we refer to hypothetical people.
Edited by HighCrate
Honestly, in my experience the generic/neutral "he" is pretty widely seen as sexist these days.
"Seen as sexist" =/= "no longer commonly used" =/= "factually incorrect."
It's one way of speaking of a hypothetical person of indeterminate or irrelevant gender, among many other ways, all of them with various grammatical and political advantages and disadvantages.
I agree with rewriting articles to use gender-neutral language whenever possible.
I see nothing wrong with it, either.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
A singular "they" would make the most sense.
Plenty of educated people see the generic/neutral "he" as the only literate option ... which makes me want to be conservative about changing it. It might be best to treat it as we do American/British spelling.
"She was the kind of dame they write similes about." —Pterodactyl Jones
I'd support a first-come-first-serve approach. There's little need in favor of a change so long as each article is internally consistent.
I do take issue with the point behind this, though. I mean, some articles avoid pronouns altogether, by using names like Alice, Bob, Charlie, etc. Should those names be made "gender neutral" as well? If we change the generic he to the singular they because it strips away hypothetical gender, then shouldn't we change Alice to Alex and Bob to Brighton?
The "generic he is sexist" argument concerns describing positive positions of power as "male only," as implying only males can be famous, good, or powerful is sexist. The argument does not concern every use of the generic he, like using the generic he to describe a character in a scenario to better explain a trope.
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
If we're giving an example by describing a situation with named characters (Alice and Bob), these don't need to be gender-neutral because they're just explaining one way the trope can happen. But when describing the general concept of a trope, we should avoid gendered language because it can give the impression that gender is an important aspect of the trope, which is not always the case.
Edited by Zuxtron
I can agree. The issue here is Men Are Generic, Women Are Special.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
@waterblap: actually, the intent behind it was consistency, as most pages already use gender-neutral language, as well as being inclusive - "he" is perfectly serviceable, but implies a distinction that does not actually exist, so "they" is better.
@highcrate: the singular "they" would be fine for most pages, wouldn't it? there are exceptions, but for the vast majority of tropes in which gender is irrelevant, it makes more sense not to specify, to avoid implying that connection.
@jhimmibhob: the singular "they" has been in use since the 14th century. it's just as grammatically valid. even if academics prefer "he", the wiki is not held to academic standards.
Migrated to Chloe Jessica!
Well, I use "it" for the article in question. We're talking about little critter that burrow itself in your brain and control you like puppet, sound like hairworms to me. No need to humanize it.
^ That's a good point. In this case, the character isn't human.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure Pureness
Agreed on singular "they" being used when the gender of the person in the description is irrelevant, and when not talking about a non-sapient creature.
Edited by ILikeRobots Adventurers: homeless people who steal from tombs and kill things.
I mean, like I said, the singular "they" is my personal preference in most cases, but it's also my personal preference to use the more etymologically sound spellings of words like "armor" and "center" instead of the etymologically suspect francophilic variations that Johnson insisted on codifying in his dictionary, and that makes British people upset for some reason, so we tend to compromise on that one with the "first-come first-served" rule.
This seems like a similar situation is all.
Edited by HighCrate
the difference there is that using gendered language can imply that gender is important to the trope when it isn't. the different spellings are purely aesthetic.
Migrated to Chloe Jessica!
shrug I'm not going to argue too hard against making something that is, after all, my personal preference the standard. I do think those concerns are a tad overblown. The neutral "he" has been a part of the English language for enough centuries for people to know it when they see it and not mistake it for rigid gender specificity.
Edited by HighCrate
Re: the above response to me: The generic he is not exclusive and doesn't always imply specificity to males.
—
Generally gender isn't important to a trope because a "gender inversion" is just the same trope but played differently. I disagree that pronoun use changes that, or confuses tropers into thinking the trope only concerns a specific gender.
EDIT: We have Always Male and Always Female for tropes where the gender is significant. I'd argue that pronoun use on a trope description matters less than the trope's inclusion on those indexes, as far as specoficity is concerned.
Edited by WaterBlap Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
Honestly, this feels like a much larger issue than we could ever hope to resolve in a mere Ask The Tropers thread. The debate over how best to refer to a single person of unknown gender has been going on for quite some time now, and there's still significant disagreement over which methods are acceptable, elegant, and so on and so forth. To issue a proclamation that we should (for example) only be using singular "they" in such situations strikes me as arbitrary and unjustified—we just don't have that kind of authority. (Nobody does, really, which is why we aren't all doing it the same way already.)
So with that in mind, my support goes to the first-come-first-served approach.
Edited by MrL1193
Ghost in the Machine uses masculine pronouns in its description. id like to rewrite it to use gender-neutral pronouns instead, but am worried this could be considered Righting Great Wrongs. i think it's ok, because a) it's not an example and thus has no reality to correspond to and b) it doesn't actually affect the content of the description at all. i just wanted to get some opinions first.
Edited by razorrozar7