Slip up on gender-neutral Sprite dialogue?

[FibS]

I wasn't quite paying attention during a rest in between grinds, but a skit triggered in which I believe Watts said the Dwarf Elder was worried about "the little runt over there" (Popoi) and asked Watts to keep an eye on "him".

If so, WHOOPS

EDIT: Sure are a lot of edgy boys in the responses >_> All I'm saying is that the game goes well out of its way to avoid giving Popoi a gender, to the point of absurdity and very unnatural sentence structure, and then My Man Watts strides in dropping the him-bombs and nobody says a thing about it lol

[Bamethyst38]

Gender neutrality makes me laugh in general.

Quina from ff9 was the first character I was exposed to this but they handled it well with s/he.

[Call Sign: Raven]

I don't understand why people make a big deal about genders in video games in 2018. By now, we have a huge amount of great games to choose from. We have strong female and male protaganists, extensive character creators that will let you make almost anything, and even a few games that have these new fangled gender-neutral types, like Breath of the Wild's design choice with Link being sort of ambiguous.

Look, I'm a man. So does playing Super Metroid lessen the experience because Samus is a woman? No way. If I decided to play Bayonetta, I'm not going to write to the company and say they are sexist because they didn't include a male archetype. Jesus Christ and his brother boy-George! But people get all sensitve about issues that just...don't matter. It doesn't matter what digital models look like in fantasy games.

And OP, I'm in no way suggesting you are sensitive. I just can't wait to see all the vitriol you might get for pointing it out.

[(Shadow)]

Originally posted by FibS:

I wasn't quite paying attention during a rest in between grinds, but a skit triggered in which I believe Watts said the Dwarf Elder was worried about "the little runt over there" (Popoi) and asked Watts to keep an eye on "him".

If so, WHOOPS

So what

[Bamethyst38]

Originally posted by Harrison Ford:

I don't understand why people make a big deal about genders in video games in 2018. By now, we have a huge amount of great games to choose from. We have strong female and male protaganists, extensive character creators that will let you make almost anything, and even a few games that have these new fangled gender-neutral types, like Breath of the Wild's design choice with Link being sort of ambiguous.

Look, I'm a man. So does playing Super Metroid lessen the experience because Samus is a woman? No way. If I decided to play Bayonetta, I'm not going to write to the company and say they are sexist because they didn't include a male archetype. Jesus Christ and his brother boy-George! But people get all sensitve about issues that just...don't matter. It doesn't matter what digital models look like in fantasy games.

And OP, I'm in no way suggesting you are sensitive. I just can't wait to see all the vitriol you might get for pointing it out.

It's politics and the evolution of the mainstream Left, especially SJWs. There are some people who make this into too much of a big deal when it really isn't.

I don't play that pronoun ♥♥♥♥ myself. In this world, you have to risk being offended and you can't just coddle people to their feelings.

[Chibi Life]

He acts like a boy to me... not sure why there's any doubt >_> Even his voice actor sounds like a boy lol

[Maacbeyr]

Originally posted by Mistress of Boredom:

He acts like a boy to me... not sure why there's any doubt >_> Even his voice actor sounds like a boy lol

Sprite's VA is a lady named Lizzie Freeman apparently. She's in some other games like My Time at Portia and Dust: An Elysian Tail.

[Chibi Life]

Originally posted by Maacbeyr:

Originally posted by Mistress of Boredom:

He acts like a boy to me... not sure why there's any doubt >_> Even his voice actor sounds like a boy lol

Sprite's VA is a lady named Lizzie Freeman apparently. She's in some other games like My Time at Portia and Dust: An Elysian Tail.

It's not uncommon for female voice actors to do the voices for little boys since it's very easy for a female to do a little boy's voice.

[Sephaël]

Originally posted by Maacbeyr:

Originally posted by Mistress of Boredom:

He acts like a boy to me... not sure why there's any doubt >_> Even his voice actor sounds like a boy lol

Sprite's VA is a lady named Lizzie Freeman apparently. She's in some other games like My Time at Portia and Dust: An Elysian Tail.

Using VA actress for young boy is very common.

[Buffmania]

The sprite has always been male. Even in the original there were several masculine pronouns used on him. Also, when gaining Gnome's powers, Gnome mistakenly refers to Primm as popoi's wife.

[KaosReigns]

Im with Buffmania, im pretty sure they actually have him as male in the original. I will play through my copy of the old version soon and update this with what the Dialogue from that part.

[FibS]

Originally posted by Buffmania:

The sprite has always been male. Even in the original there were several masculine pronouns used on him. Also, when gaining Gnome's powers, Gnome mistakenly refers to Primm as popoi's wife.

That is not entirely correct.

In the original Japanese version, Popoi's gender is never revealed. This is possible because the Japanese language features gendered pronouns, including gender-neutral. The English language does not, and when confronted with gender-neutral pronouns most translations of the NES and SNES era assume for male. This can sometimes cause clearly female characters to be referred to as male because the translators see only the raw text and not the respective character in image.

The most acceptable reason to Western sensibilities for why Popoi is presented as gender-neutral is because Japanese RPGS are obsessed with gender-balancing playable casts (note the sequel SD3 has 3 boys and 3 girls), but Secret of Mana has three characters, so the third one is neutral to avoid explicitly upsetting the balance.

The other reason is that Japanese media is also obsessed with gender-bender characters, particularly crossdessing men or femboys. To this day many girly-looking male characters appear in Japanese games and are localized into English as female - two modern examples from Animal Crossing include Saharah / Roland (all camels have long eyelashes) and Gracie / Grace (a flamboyant male fashion designer).

Odd coincidence given the topic: Secret of Mana was originally a very large CD game, and much content was cut to fit it into a cartridge. A lot of this content made it into Chrono Trigger, which is why Crono and Marle look so much like Randi and Primm. Chrono Trigger happens to feature Flea (Mayonnai), a crossdressing pink-haired male who in a very rare turn of events is localized as such instead of being labeled female.

So yeah, this is not a magical new SJW thing - it's simply a better localization from Japanese.

[Lyraterra]

Originally posted by Buffmania:

The sprite has always been male. Even in the original there were several masculine pronouns used on him. Also, when gaining Gnome's powers, Gnome mistakenly refers to Primm as popoi's wife.

You know non-heterosexual people exist, right? Primm being Popoi's wife means nothing about their gender or identity.

[KaosReigns]

Originally posted by Lyraterra:

Originally posted by Buffmania:

The sprite has always been male. Even in the original there were several masculine pronouns used on him. Also, when gaining Gnome's powers, Gnome mistakenly refers to Primm as popoi's wife.

You know non-heterosexual people exist, right? Primm being Popoi's wife means nothing about their gender or identity.

You know they are called homosexuals and not non-heterosexual right?

Or are you one of them snowflakes that thinks "Homosexual" is a bad term? Its not, its just the english variant of hetero but for man-man or girl-girl.

Also, this is NOT opinion, this is backed by fact.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/homosexual

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/homosexual

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality

[No' Name]

I always thought Popoi was a boy, even back in the SNES version, but you're correct, they don't really use very many indicators that he is a boy.

As mentioned before, he kind of acts like a boy, so really, never had any doubt about what gender he was. And I played this game way back when I was like 8-10 or something like that lol,

[KaosReigns]

Originally posted by Humor:

I always thought Popoi was a boy, even back in the SNES version, but you're correct, they don't really use very many indicators that he is a boy.

As mentioned before, he kind of acts like a boy, so really, never had any doubt about what gender he was. And I played this game way back when I was like 8-10 or something like that lol,

Oh, when we only had 3 genders. Good times, good times.

Male, Female, Hermaphrodite - These are the 3 sexes(genders for those weird people) of mankind. Hermaphrodite, can be considered the gender neutral, as its both male and female, and neither male nor female.