,
8 tweets,
1 min read
Read on Twitter
we spend a lot of time talking about gender-neutral third person pronouns but god you can get SO MUCH mileage by just speaking in the second person and letting the reader project
i haven't been playing sunless sea but i've been seeing everybody else talk about it and the way that failbetter games does this is fantastic
with fallen london what you input just has people call you by a certain address that is filled in, and if you pick the mysterious one they stutter and correct themselves over it every time
with that it's still framed as picking a gender but in sunless seas/skies you just straight up pick a form of address for other people to call you by and that's it. it's great!
i got started thinking this because i looked up "the chaconne" by dessa and the commenters keep posting out that the violinist is never gendered
here's that
there's a lot of ways you can give your audience a little bit of inspiration to think on and they'll run the rest of the way themselves and thank you for it, you/yours is just one of them
video games are the easy context for this because they're usually written in second person but you can get away with gendering people by making people talk to and not about them
