I just find this gif very funny.
Unfortunately, this has also reminded me of one of the questions that lingered in my mind since fourth grade: “why the hell are people so averse to using they/them?”
Fourth grade me was still a baby, still too dumb to realize the WOKE in the world with little access to internet connection and still without any social media accounts (thankfully). The question started to spring in my mind as merely a grammatical argument and the birth of one of my early mildly-inconveniencing and too-specific pet peeves of using “he/she” when unsure of or pertaining to no specific gender. Like why are you doing all that work to say “He/she must uphold the standards of the school.” when you can just use “they”?
I have no recollection of how this came to me, and I only used the internet to play Stardoll, y8 dot com and slowly dying Facebook games by that point so there was nothing to impose the idea of using “they” instead of “she/he” to my smooth baby brain. But I do specifically remember it being a pet peeve up to sixth grade, especially when English class came. But I also didn’t come to question the use of “he/she” in texts to my teachers, nor was my use of “they” in instances that usually use “he/she” questioned or commented on. So it wasn’t a problem. Again, just a mild annoyance for me.
For a campus journalism contest, our speaker for our press conference was transfeminine. The press conference was spoken in Filipino, and the language had no gendered pronouns. I was in seventh grade, thirteen and baby, again, too baby to know to politely ask what their pronouns were, so were my groupmates, so were the rest of our competition. I used “they/them” to refer to them in my writeups, the rest of my groupmates either used “he/him” or “she/her”. There is no fault here but not asking what their pronouns were even if we didn’t know better. It probably had no bearing on the competition and little bearing to my point for today’s entry, but I still think of it from time to time. I wonder what they preferred to be referred as, even if there’s a chance they didn’t care, for multiple reasons.
Around pandemic era I saw so much discourse one Twitter (shudders) on why or why not chara and frisk being referred to as “they/them” for every instance leaves their actual pronouns up to interpretation to the audience, be it (mostly) from self-inserting, actual character interpretation or other reasons.
THEN WE COME TO DELTARUNE.
Kris is an interesting character to be subjected to this, because the idea of “they/them” being substitute pronouns to what the player wants to refer to Kris as falls flat with every chapter that releases. It’s been clear as day that one of the main plotlines and questions of the story is the connection of the SOUL/player with Kris, and their identity that has been long established and then blurred with the player’s control.
I alongside the woke mob of Deltarune fans argue that “they/them” are the actual pronouns that Kris uses and always have been used by everyone surrounding them because:
a.) it’s what’s only been referred to them as in the whole game;
b.) their personal identity is already established in Hometown and thus to need for player’s self-inserting and projection/interpretation on who they really are (it plays with the identity meta-narrative that Toby has long set-up and the Kris+player relationship); and
c.) they/them is normal to use for a singular person and a lot of people are still pissed about it so leads to more people being adamant of “they/them” usage.
I could also argue that that one hangout conversation regarding Seth strengthens the “THEY/THEM DOES NOT EQUAL ROOM FOR INTERPRETATION” argument when asked about whether they’re a “boy” or a “girl”, and that the gender identity spectrum of the world goes beyond the binary! there are a handful of characters already going by “they/them” even before chapter five’s main inclusions of green and seth!
and by no means am i dissing stuff like headcanons of kris using multiple pronouns, i’m very much fine with that! and i understand why people are kind of annoyed of how adamant fans are with correcting pronoun usage for kris (but the they/the m is pretty funny as of the moment for me we’ll see how that goes) and that for some people, unless explicitly stated, they take it up to interpretation. I am just frustrated because a lot of discussions i see are of canon stuff, and then when mentioning kris they just default to (mostly) he/him when they’ve never been referred to that in canon.
It frustrates me deeply that people are so very averse to “they/them” as pronouns referring to an individual all throughout my life. i’ve been pretty okay with it before i was even ten and before i had a concept of gender and sexuality beyond girl boy “normal” and gay, but i guess we all are different
like sure, Kris doesn’t explicitly say “i use they/them”, but also people don’t go around asking for pronouns in hometown (and the underground by extension). The term “nonbinary” doesn’t exist or is stated in the whole game, but so is “lesbian” “gay” “bisexual” “transgender” etc. and yet it’s obviously represented in so, so many characters. it’s kinda like saying susie and noelle are straight!
All in all, my pissed-off-edness is directed at those who refuse to use “they/them”. It not only reflects how you’d treat the topic in real life, it’s also because it’s so simple to just say it. Why are you complaining about the deltarune woke mob policing a character’s pronouns when you’re the one being a baby about it. I get that it may come off as too much, but that mentality comes off as some sort of self-inflicted blindness as to what the character is and what it represents.
As someone who doesn’t care so much about labels on my own identity, I don’t know why I’m as heated as I am. But I am.