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it's not really that strange when you consider that Gav specifies his preferred pronouns on his twitter bio. So he seems to be in that twitter click that think about this stuff at length

dyndraig wrote:
it's not really that strange when you consider that Gav specifies his preferred pronouns on his twitter bio. So he seems to be in that twitter click that think about this stuff at length

TIL that taking five seconds to normalize pronoun usage was "being in a twitter click that obsesses over it".

It's super old news, and I believe it was explained that Admech don't even think of themselves as human - flesh is weak etc.

However, imo if they really would speak machine language, they'd refer to themselves as names or serial numbers all the time, like "Servant 022 thought", "Servant 022 greeted Servant 025".

This is one thing I will never understand about the english languge, because in ours every word has a gender an can be assigned one of the 3 gender specific endings. Can't really wrap my head around the fact that sometimes in books it could go for 2-3 pages, before you go, oh so that is a dude or chick.

Karol wrote:
This is one thing I will never understand about the english languge, because in ours every word has a gender an can be assigned one of the 3 gender specific endings. Can't really wrap my head around the fact that sometimes in books it could go for 2-3 pages, before you go, oh so that is a dude or chick.

In fairness a lot of that is done by name but also character description. There's only a few books (normally written by bad/new writers) that I've ever read where the characters gender is ambiguous by accident rather than intent (a few book series the gender of a character is supposed to be a mystery or unknown etc...). So most of the time you do know. Of course translation and reading a different language might make some things not appear as obvious.

 Shadenuat wrote:
It's super old news, and I believe it was explained that Admech don't even think of themselves as human - flesh is weak etc.

However, imo if they really would speak machine language, they'd refer to themselves as names or serial numbers all the time, like "Servant 022 thought", "Servant 022 greeted Servant 025".

As per my post last page, it is not just Adeptus Mechanicus characters and it is not just Gav Thorpe that's used those particular pronouns. Those are simply the facts. The significance or insignificance of all this doesn't matter to me, but at least let's be clear about what the actual situation is.

Going back to the transhumanism, there's plenty of trans activists out there that would love cyber-punk style trans-humanism to be available.

But it got me thinking about how body dismorphia might play into an Adept's augmentation. Some Adepts, for example, are barely recognizable as human, whereas others are almost identical to a baseline human except that their body is entirely artificial. That's with an assumed ability to modify their own brains to cut out stuff like whatever might be causing them anxiety or whatever.

Like the Imperium, it's also worth noting that Martian civilization isn't entirely unitary, and different authors have different takes on it. Within that there's plenty of room for sub-cultures, cults, 'non-traditional' lifestyles, and approaches to gender. Which is to say plenty of things are gendered, although not as much in English as in other languages, and less so than in others. Ships are the usual example of gendered machinery in English.

Iracundus wrote:
As per my post last page, it is not just Adeptus Mechanicus characters and it is not just Gav Thorpe that's used those particular pronouns. Those are simply the facts. The significance or insignificance of all this doesn't matter to me, but at least let's be clear about what the actual situation is.

What is the situation? Have you seen what happened with Star Wars? You cannot force things on your audience and get away with it. Seen the SoB reveal with whole room of bearded nerds celebrating? Not much going for inclusivity there.

Yeah, politics alters everything, and writers are happy to jump on a boat of what's popular today and will draw them extra audience. But since politics is banned on Dakka, we won't be able to discuss this enough anyway.

Nurglitch wrote:
Going back to the transhumanism, there's plenty of trans activists out there that would love cyber-punk style trans-humanism to be available.

And the same amount would also come down on things like that in holy fury as evident by CD Project's Red new game.

Karol wrote:
This is one thing I will never understand about the english languge, because in ours every word has a gender an can be assigned one of the 3 gender specific endings. Can't really wrap my head around the fact that sometimes in books it could go for 2-3 pages, before you go, oh so that is a dude or chick.

As a Finn I have an opposite reaction, we don't even have gendered pronouns. And when I really start to think about it, using a different pronoun based on person's gender is highly weird and probably makes the difference to seem much more fundamental in people's minds than it actually is. Imagine if we would use different pronouns based on people's height or *shudder* skin colour.

 Muhr wrote:
The new usage of these pronouns such as "they" instead of "him/her" would be confusing at best when used in print.

Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie (which won the Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke awards, so, pretty well regarded) specifically doesn't use gender pronouns for the POV civilization in the series. She does this purposefully, which leaves the reader to attribute gender to characters based more on their roles in the story than because they've been told the character's gender.

Also, we're talking about English, literally the most bastardized language on Earth: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/english-is-not-normal?utm_source=fbsynd&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR2SrLfuHReH6KPwG9VxnRgnOMa8Pl7MPkHfsDLCoV5Zgow8LQmDiOzqbpw

Looks like this has been covered.