Forum - View topicJason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga - Special Guest Edition: Wish
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1817 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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Yeah. People keep trying to come up with genderless personal pronouns, but none of them really stick since they only work in SF/fantasy contexts. "S/he" is unpronounceable, so it wouldn't work for dialogue. (Tagalog has the opposite "problem" of not having masculine or feminine pronouns.) |
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Julia-the-Great
 Posts: 328 |
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Talking about the genderless topic, I'd like to know everyone's opinions on how other series handled the problem. For example, Soul Eater, in which the character Crona is referred to in the English adaptation as "he" but is never referred to as "boy" or "girl," unlike in Wish as I've mentioned before with the "girly girl" comments. (This is going off the anime version of Soul Eater, as I haven't read the manga yet)
Then there's an original English language example, the webcomic The Order of the Stick, where the elf Vaarsuvius isn't identified as being either male or female, but other characters refer to him/her based on how they perceive him/her, as either "he" or "she" depending. |
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Sewingrose
 Posts: 579 |
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I think that unless the Spivak or like-styled pronouns catch on, it's going to be grammatically impossible to have a genderless character unless the author is actually putting thought into pulling it off. And off the top of my head I can think of two ways that you can have a genderless character in an English setting, without having to halt the plot to explain how the character in question identifies.
One where it's first person narration, and they never bother to mention it. Granted you will have people assuming while reading, but keep some details vague and it can work. The other is similar to Julia-the-Great's post, never concretely establish their sex or gender. You can have other characters refer to the character in question as "he"/"she" but you need to establish that at least two people are in fact referring to the same person by different pronouns, which might be awkward to do. I think Crona can get by being called "he" and still established as gender ambiguous because the English language does have a default preference to male-pronouns. |
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Saturn
 Posts: 513 |
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I have to agree with the idea that while Wish is a lovely series, CCS is Clamp's most "perfect" work.. in that it has a firm beginning, middle, and end. They don't seem to be able to pull off that ending thing all that well, though they do have some amazing beginnings and middles, and, more importantly (YMMV) amazing characters throughout. Another excellent one is Tokyo Babylon.
Also I agree that it's a huge pain in the ass to try to portray a character as genderless, but it's also kind of obvious that Kohaku was intended to be on the masculine side of the gender spectrum. BL without being BL. We need a reprint! |
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