Talk:Napstablook/@comment-98.245.241.250-20151106050344/@comment-27087869-20151115000856

" Japanese DOES have pronouns, and at least two are even gender-specific. Namely, 彼 and 彼女."

I heard that those are rarely used outside of boyfriend/girlfriend contexts.

I'm pretty sure that in the Japanese language, it's really easy not to specify a person's gender since they can easily omit third-person pronouns. Ex: In english, a sentence could be something like "who baked it?", but in japanese it would be something like "who baked?"

However, their first-person pronouns (the equivalent of our English "I") do have gendered connotations ("boku" is often used by boys, "atashi" is used by girly-girls,  "watashi" is technically gender-neutral but males don't use it as often as females do except in formal situations,  etc).

I dunno, I just felt like nitpicking on that lol. Last things I'll say:

There is a difference between "unknown gender" and "nonbinary". I think if a character's gender is unknown then each individual is allowed to have their own interpretation, whether they think the character is male or female or nonbinary.

"They", after all, can be used to refer to someone whose gender one does not know. It's pretty hard to write in English without using third-person pronouns.