Holy wall of text Batman.
I've got to weigh in on this one, if only to state my opinion and/or play devil's advocate where necessary.
I notice a lot of what I'm addressing has already been addressed so please excuse me there.
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IVAN has a loooooot of gender issues, many of which have been addressed here, but this is still going to be a beanplatingly long post.
It does, and remember this is a game written way back beginning in the early 2000s when such issues weren't really at the forefront, unlike recent years.
The devs are not particularly subtle about their choices, have a read through Dialog.txt in the github if you get the chance, should give you a fair idea of their general attitude.
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A fourth sex, transsexual, is defined in the code but unused, and if my reading of character::GetPersonalPronoun() etc. is correct they would also use 'she' pronouns. According to Doc/Obsolete/Main.txt it was intended to be 'something between the three'. In the nicest possible terms, that is total fucking bullshit. 'Transgender' or 'trans' is currently preferred. Neither 'transsexual', 'transgender', nor 'trans' is a sex or a gender; it is used to qualify existing genders.
Since trans is undefined and unused in the actual game, it's likely it's just using placeholders (i.e. the "she" pronoun).
Also again a reminder that the game is from early 2000s. I remember reading somewhere in the old documents that there were plans for a "Tranny" npc or status ailment if that helps shed some light on that (and the choice of language).
As the code is currently unimplemented, there's no reason why we can't just rename or remove it as appropriate.
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At the moment the full list of female humans and nonhumans appearing in IVAN is:
[snip]
Notice how many of them have an identity solely defined in-game by being someone's wife (#). There is exactly one male NPC referred to as a husband (and it's not the name displayed in-game).
With the exception (or not?) of Petrus' wives, all unnamed human NPCs are defined by their jobs.
Remember that IVAN is set a feudal shithole world run by a maybe-not-so-benevolent-dictator-ultra-priest and with that comes old-fashioned ideas and roles.
That means (at least in places ruled by Petrus) that men do the "hard work" and the women are restricted to house labor.
Therefore the male NPCs are called farmer, hunter, banana grower etc. and likewise the women are named by their occupation - slave, housewife, priestess etc.
Petrus' wives' occupation is simply... well to sit around, be married to Petrus and be used as sex slaves basically. That's just how it is.
Oh there's also the tourists which have male/female/child variants but it's commonplace to refer to tourists as, well, tourists. That is in fact an exception to the whole occupation thing.
Red Kangaroo and Serin have also echoed some of my thoughts on this in an earlier post.
In short, Attnam is not a modern-day happy place of diversity and gender equality and it would make no sense to change that as you'd be tipping the game world on its head and alienating everyone.
However, I am too am all for more diverse (or inverted?) gender roles in
different towns not ruled by Petrus. There's no reason to not have a little fun with different towns as we go further into development.
I also support the idea of allowing more females to science talk but feel like only the Priestess of Silva is qualified to meet the criteria here.
The housewives, slaves and Petrus wives are, well, trained to just be homemakers and/or slaves so it doesn't make sense for them to hold an enlightening conversation when it's unlikely they received any kind of academic education.
But given we can sci-talk with a dog, I think there's some leeway for letting them sci-talk at a low level, unless we consider the dog-sci-talk as more of a joke than anything.
Mistresses are skilled in only fighting and sex so it also makes sense for them to not have a high sci-talk level.
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Stuff on genderless monsters, pronouns etc
Since the "sex" attribute is never directly referenced in game, there's no real need to change it in the code, but at the same time if people
really wanted to I can agree that it would in fact be better represented as "pronoun", especially since the code to retrieve the pronoun is called "get pronoun". However, as I said, this is not a user-facing change and therefore not necessary.
A person might think that mutant bunnies are an exception, but they actually have their own entry per sex in the script files, so they don't actually pull from the Sex attribute in-game.
As for referring to monsters as "it" I'd like to offer another perspective:
You're not playing an all-knowing monster encyclopedia of a character. You were raised by hippos. You are not smart. The only way you learn and become smarter is by reading books about gods and talking about science with people, which isn't really relevant to say, identifying the sex of a given monster or animal.
If you can't immediately tell what a monster is by looking at it and using common sense, then it makes absolute sense for the player to refer to the monster as "it".
For example, in the case of a lion, as far as you know all lions have manes. Maybe Kaethos could've told you or maybe you heard about them from somewhere but they're not native to Tweraif so you wouldn't really know for sure.
To make things even more confusing, maned female lions are also a thing in the real world.
In the case of zombies of humans... well maybe their identifying features have rotted off. It's also pretty common practice to refer to zombies as "it" to begin with.
Goblins we can probably put under the umbrella of specifically calling them "it" to be derogatory (because they're horrible creatures) and/or because it's hard for our not-very-smart human to tell sex at a glance.
As for Orcs, depending on the game's interpretation of what orcs are, they may be an entirely male race, and undefined sex race (e.g. 40k fungus orcs) or perhaps are just a regular race of males and females and the only ones we see in-game
currently are the males because they are the ones geared up and sent out to do battle.
In this case, I see our pronoun options for orcs being "he" (assuming the player knows the stuff mentioned earlier) or "it" as derogatory.
Again mutant bunnies are the exception here (since you can't tell at a glance what sex a rabbit is without having in-depth knowledge of them) but that might be a gameplay issue since it lets you know that two bunnies might mate and produce more horrid offspring to kill.
I do like the idea of CHA raising and causing subtle changes to how the player refers to things though.
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It may be a beneficial to add a fourth option 'they' or 'zie' to the pronoun attribute, or split it into 5 text attributes which do not have hardcoded values (subject, object, possessive dependent, possessive independent, reflexive). This would also accommodate nonbinary player characters.
While I am tentatively fine with the idea of the player being referred to as whatever pronouns (since it's meant to be
you and you can make your own decisions about that) I don't agree with allowing for a range of pronouns for other characters.
This goes back to the same idea of the character referring to things using "it" if they don't know how to identify sex at a glance - you're raised by hippos and adopted into a society that strictly uses "he" or "she" pronouns. Potentially "they" when unsure.
It would not make sense for the player to say, use the look command and hover over an NPC and see, for example "A Lunethia guard stands here. Xhe does not care about you" because it would make sense that the player, being from a society that uses only "he" or "she" to try to use what they believe is the most appropriate pronoun.
Dialog from NPCs however could be fine, as the player would be able to audibly hear what the person is saying and any confusion produced on the part of the actual real-life player of the game would make perfect sense and be entirely appropriate.
e.g. "Don't trust what that shopkeeper, Dunhasurd has to say - zhri is a serial liar and all of zhris merchandise is old and shabby."
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'She' pronoun player characters (and more) would be a very good addition to the game. Presentation (so far reflected in the alternative hair sprites, which are great), gender, and sex are separate attributes which correlate strongly in Western culture, and need not necessarily correlate in IVAN. People of any gender can have or not have beards, breasts, and long hair
I am fine with this and think it would be a splendid idea (and not just because I like my hair sprites).
However I like the idea of having a randomly assigned player character even better. i.e. no choice of whether your player is male or female.
Perhaps the idea of being able to assign pronouns would best be relegated to a menu option, and otherwise defaulted to player sex? Idk.
I also like the idea of randomized hair, facial or otherwise regardless of sex but still influenced by WIS/INT.
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As a sprite game with 16x16 tiles each packing so much information into a small space, I'm not sure that titillating presumed straight male players by having 'she' pronoun player characters be topless by default with 2x2 pixel breasts is a grave concern.
Yeah I don't think we'd be able to get recognizable breasts rendered in the small space we're given either. I think it'd be best just to leave the chest bare, although with a different sprite for male/female so they are distinct.
Maybe with a little definition, but there's no way we're going to have breasts and nipples rendered in pristine HD-for-sprite-based-game quality without making every female look like a triple G cup.
Even if we could I don't think anyone's really going to get up in arms over 16x16 exposed boobies.
That's my two cents.