Apologies… something weird happened and it’s now back on dashingdon. First off, I value everyone’s opinion, but see… Rowling had a kid, and she modeled Harry after her son.
“Write what you know” is a truism that has been tested by time. I mean, sure you can “do the research” but it’s like driving a car, you can do all the research you want, but you have to drive a car to know what it’s like to drive a car, otherwise everything is going to sound fake to the people who have actually driven cars.
Unless you having serious mad fun (like Pratchett or Adams or whoever) everyone writes what they know, that is if they have had any hope of doing any quality work.
What I’m getting at is something called the “ring of truth”. Do you know why the interaction with mom sounds so authentic? because my mom did that… all. the. time. And it was annoying and so I could write it exactly the way she did it, and I know there are other moms who do this, and that people could relate to this.
So this is why this is gender-neutral, because once anyone starts coding for it they are going to end up blindfolded in a minefield and you never know if you are going to step on a mine.
the majority of the original characters I’ve created over the years are cisgender guys.
Exactly… because cisgender guys are easy to code for, we just have he, his and him. There’s a huge minefield of unwritten rules for coding non-binary people that I’m not familiar with, that I would have to take the better part of a month or two to even learn, and even after that there are a ton of pronouns, some of which are actually made up (but you don’t know which ones are made up, of course) so there’s no way to find out until someone gets offended that you did not include his personal pronoun.
A non-binary person on this site flagged me on this site because I dared say “cat have a I” was bad grammar no matter what.
And also because @Laguz said it was fine, so I’m going with it unless you can assure me someone is not going to be offended that he could not use his personal pronouns. I did try, but if you look at @Laguz 's post (that he has deleted for some reason) you’d see exactly that…
I’ve heard “you can write stories with minorities in them, but you shouldn’t write stories about *being* minorities unless you are one”.
Nobody wants to do Choice of Gender.
And that’s exactly right, and why this is gender-neutral - because otherwise there will be so much gender-specific code, everyone might as well be playing Choice of Gender
Apologies again for the tone, I’m a little miffed because of the server screw-up, which I’m going to have to fix now