[ SECRET POST #2946 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2946 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 038 secrets from Secret Submission Post #421.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I found "she/her" as default an odd choice given that we know the narrator's culture doesn't have "gender" anymore and that the language they're speaking is not really English, but some unnamed fictional language that presumably has only one pronoun which is gender-neutral. So "she" is really a fictionalized translation convention, and I don't think the best one for the author to choose if she wanted to show that the narrator defaults to genderblindness. It made me wonder if the author was one of those people who nitpick about how "they" can't be singular.

[sarillia]

That does sound like an odd choice.

[(Anonymous)]

... I would also think it was weird if "he" was the default pronoun (and more annoying), by the way.

[esteefee]

I would find it equally not annoying, but squickifying. I found it upsetting reading the book because it is misgendering the characters, and you *know* it's misgendering the characters because the author actually makes a point of it (makes certain you know that a character who is "male" in one language is referred to as "she" throughout the rest of the book, and you don't know who else is being misgendered.)

I don't know what purpose the author thought she was serving, but it wasn't one I appreciated.

What ever is wrong with "they"?

[ariakas]

Yes, it's mentioned that the character you're talking about is "male", but not a "man". The narrator knows said character is biologically male, and as such characters who are not part of her culture and do not speak her language refer to that character as "he" - that doesn't mean that character identifies as "he". She is quite happily referred to as "she" and never corrected by the one character that is of her language and culture. How is that "misgendering" anyone?

You'd think that of all people OP would know "male" =/= "man".

[esteefee]

I'm not OP. Just so you know.

The writer makes a point of identifying the character as male so that she can 2 pages later, in the character's language which is the "genderless" language that she couldn't find a neutral pronoun for, tried to use "they" for and ended up using "she" for instead, identify as "she." So yes, he is misgendered. He is totally misgendered. You and I and everyone knows he is misgendered. The author made a clumsy *point* of misgendering him, just to further her story's agenda.

And that's why ick.

[ariakas]

What.

How do we "know" Seivarden is misgendered? She's perfectly fine with the pronoun "she", which is what she uses in her own language. Outsiders who don't know any better label her "he" because she is biologically male. They're misgendering her.

Claiming that, because someone is biologically male, they must be "he" - and that "you and I and everyone knows" it - is honestly what's "ick", here.

[lb_lee]

This is fascinating to me, because I had a similar linguistics headache with one of my series. (The language the characters speak has basically three sets of pronouns: I/we, you/y'all, it/they, and often whether it's singular or plural is skipped.) I ended up even having to make a meta post on it, explaining that I was often inserting gender, because using 'it' all the time would come off as UBER-dehumanizing and creepy, depending on what was going on in the story.

Fictional translation woes, man.

--Rogan

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I hear you. I had similar problems trying to write with different degrees of formal, something that modern English distinctly lacks.

[lb_lee]

Uuuugh, no kidding. At least I was able to work around that by using titles and such. (The more douchey the customer gets, the more elaborate your titles get for them!) Still, it doesn't compare to something like Japanese, where you can slice someone's to ribbons just by conjugating your verbs different.

--Rogan

[ketita]

That was one of the reasons that in the comic I'm working on we decided to use real-world languages (and even made up a reason for many of the characters to speak English between themselves), to avoid too much translation.
Conlangs are so cool, though. It was very difficult for me to resist the temptation to make ALL the conlangs.

[lb_lee]

Yeah, in my case, there wasn't any other option; it was a land with no native mammals, and no other humans at all, and the whole point of the setting was to show different cultural, linguistic, and social norms. Them using English would've broken the setting.

I haven't actually MADE the language and probably never will, because uuuuugh, sign language with different dialects based on how many limbs you have? It'd SUCK. Most of the time, it works out fine.

[ketita]

Okay yeah, it doesn't look like you'd manage to avoid "translation" in this case. That's really cool, though.
...are you sure you aren't at least a teeeeeeeeny bit tempted to work out some of that language? :3
Our story also has a bunch of different cultures, but since we're using existing languages we made up an in-universe reason to explain English being the lingua franca there.

[lb_lee]

*laughs* Only slightly. I'd have to work out the anatomy of most the salient species first, since form follows function, and THEN build the sign language off of that. And unfortunately, sign language is not something I know much about. (I studied Japanese instead. No regrets, but DEFINITELY not sign language.)

--Rogan

[(Anonymous)]

It made me wonder if the author was one of those people who nitpick about how "they" can't be singular.

"'They' was a distinct possibility, but while I am a huge supporter of singular 'they' in general, it didn’t feel right doing that for an entire novel. (I’m hoping to see someone pull that off, though!)" -- http://www.fantasybookreview.co.uk/interview/2014/ann-leckie/