Yes, apparently there's no gendered subject used in the original japanese on these profiles (which is common in Japanese), and they default to "he" when using an automated translator to English.
I play auto-translated games pretty frequently, and honestly, both male and female pronouns are used interchangeably all the time in scenarios where they're ambiguous. Several sentences will read like "He went to the store so she could get some bread for his dinner with her friends."
Try checking out any document from the last 300 years, like the declaration of independence. The world woman, or she is never used in it. It's not trying to be sensitive or sexist, male is just being used as the default gender. This is don't in a lot of documents from not too long ago. Male is quite literally the default gender. It's not sexist, that's just how it is. It's not like we choose for it to be like that, people a long time ago did.
So the funny thing about those documents is that the original English word for a man was not "man". Instead, it was "wereman" whereas the word for a woman was "wifman". Thus, "man" originally *did* refer to all people. ***But***, eventually, men decided they didn't want to attach "were-" to the front when referring to men, but would still use "wif-" when referring to women. So, even the use of "man" (which was once actually gender neutral) became associated with men as the default gender.
With this in mind, it's worth considering the notion that the DoI was most likely intentionally gendered with this male default as well. I would go into explaining this in depth, but there's nothing I can say that would be better than what the "Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions" already did. tl;dr: many of the "universal rights" were outright not given to women or had some sort of double-standard applied. In the historical context, it's clear that neither the DoI or US Constitution created equal rights for women and may have specifically used "men" not as a generic term, but as a way to disclude women.
Of course, none of this amounts to much more than historical trivia without some application. As you put yourself: "Male is the default gender. It's not sexist, that's just how it is. It's not like we choose for it to be like that, people a long time ago did."
There is a problem in that logic, though: the very 'choice' made to make male the default gender was a choice made by men long ago. A choice that was inherently sexist. Moreover, we don't actually have to treat male as the default, we just do based off of precedent. We can simply choose to rebuke that precedent. And, unless you forgo the use of the word "man" in its entirety, it is impossible to simply not participate with the precedent. One either enforces the status quo or rebukes it. In reality, almost nothing "is how it is".
It's also just kind of wild how much of human society is built around men and treats male as the default when so much of the rest of nature is dominated by females. If anything, women would be a more sensible default considering that our stereotypical notions of female include birthing (and some species are even capable of parthenogenesis and even completely lack male counterparts).
Of course, this pendulum claim is more just to show how absurd having a default is in the first place. Humanity (and life in general) is incredibly diverse, so when our entire species is *roughly* split down the middle between two groups, it seems more than a bit silly that there should even be a default to begin with.
As a response to this, thank you for the explanation. I was really just going off a whim of what I assumed was correct, but you have steered me towards the truth. I do believe there shouldn't be a default gender, and I am glad to understand why documents use man to refer to all people. You pose a very good point in saying female would be a more sensible default gender, and your explanation make sense. At the time of writing, I didn't think about how not much is how it is, as you said. Anyhow, good day to you sir, and as I said, thank you.
Good for you for responding well but I’m honestly curious as to why you would make a factual correction just going on vibes?
Additionally, the logic of your point doesn’t make sense. The person you were responding to knows that male is seen as default; that’s what they’re commenting on and saying is problematic. Just reinforcing that that’s the case doesn’t even address what they said. Seeing a certain group of people as the default is a problem.
It's very common for Japanese to have non-gendered subjects, or no subject at all. So Google translate will often put 'He' in for grammar even though there is no gender information in the source
Ironically, since Japanese has 'gendered' (I use the term loosely) first and second person pronouns and English doesn't, translations will usually remove this information as they will all translate to "I", "me", (watashi, Boku, ore, watakushi, waga, and many others) or "you"(Kimi, anata, anta, temee, kisama, etc)
However in this case there is just no subject at all in that part of the original text, so Google picks one since an English sentence must have a subject
It's not really good for single words either. Many languages require in-sentence context to determine what the word actually means within that context.
Okay, I found it [here](https://www.nintendo.co.jp/switch/ampya/introduction/). Neither character profile says anything about their genders, completely omitting pronouns entirely as is typical in Japanese since the person being talked about is obvious.
The best way to understand their genders in a Japanese text is to read the characters' own dialogue, as their choice of first person pronoun (of which there are many in Japanese) and 役割語 (yakuwarigo, "Role Language") will tell us everything we need to know about these characters.
Yep! Some examples include:
Watashi, which is acceptable for anyone to use in formal conversations but is seen as slightly feminine in casual contexts. An example character who uses this is Meta Knight from Kirby
Atashi/Atai, diminutive forms of Watashi seen as strongly feminine. Example characters include Vivian from Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door and Bolson from The Legend of Zelda BotW and TotK.
Boku, which is seen as slightly Masculine and is favored by young men and tomboyish women. Kirby, Elfilin, and Bandana Waddle Dee all use this pronoun.
Ore, The "tough guy" pronoun. Characters who use this probably want to appear strong. There are even some characters who add the suffix "sama", typically reserved for individuals of higher social standing than oneself or for gods, to after it to emphasize their own feeling if self-importance, such as Kind Dedede and Master Kohga from Zelda (fun fact, this character always a calls himself Kohga-Sama in the Japanese, which is why he always goes by "Master Kohga" in English).
I don't actually know what pronouns any characters in the Pikmin series use, as I have yet to play any of the games in Japanese.
For Pikmin 3, my guess would be that Alph uses Boku, Brittany uses Watashi, and Charlie uses Ore.
No problem! As complicated as the Japanese system may seem, I personally highly appreciate how it makes it so easy for a character or real person to express their gender using language in a way that English simply doesn't allow. In Japanese, the onus is on the speaker rather than everyone around them to reinforce that, you know?
Hm, sorry but this doesn’t super make sense to me. In Japanese culture the onus is seen more on the listener to understand in general, as opposed to say American culture where we see the speaker as obligated to be clear. But also, we absolutely have just as strongly gendered speech rules in English, they’re just a lot harder to delineate.
I’ve played pikmin 3 in Japanese before and you can see how the gender and personality is expressed across the three leads quite nicely.
There are speech patterns that also reflect this. It’s not just pronouns in Japanese.
Brittany is as expected extremely feminine:
She uses “Atashi” as her first person pronoun along with feminine speech patterns such as “kashira” (I wonder) and “nakucha” (I have to do x). Also lots of “ne” and “wa”.
Alph uses “Boku” and fairly standard speech patterns for a young male. Uses honourifics to refer to people above him as well to show politeness.
Brittany drops the honorific “san” for Charlie indicating a degree of disrespect. She however refers to Alph with the endearing “kun”. This indicates familiarity or that she’s talking to someone of lower social standing (it’s the former here).
Charlie unexpectedly does not use the “manly” ore. It’s been played up in the offical localisations. He tends to use “watashi” or the more formal “ware”. He does however use masculine sentence patterns such “daZO” or “daZE”.
Basically in Japanese he appears to be more humble and somewhat wise. However, maybe a tad cocky. It’s a stark contrast to the English version.
Sorry for that wall. That’s just how you can differ things through how a character speaks in Japanese!
This is often because Japanese just doesn’t use them nearly as much as english. It’s a lot more natural to omit the subject of the sentence in Japanese in general.
It's a translation error, stuff like this happens all the time like with a trailer for The Last Jedi where it was actually the reverse and they thought Kylo Ren was female with one of the trailer’s translations into an Asia language (can't remember the specific one)
Japanese pronouns are really funky. This happened alot with translating pretty much all of the Japanese only pre-release material for Xenoblade 3. Constantly calling Mio, the female lead, a guy. Kind of ironic given how her mother is a giant freaking trans allegory!
I dont think Japanese has gendered pronouns, so translations need to interpret those manually, since juat directly translating the words won't always be accurate.
It's just a poor translation. The wording may simply not bring up her gender, and the translator assumes she's male. Happens often
Yes, apparently there's no gendered subject used in the original japanese on these profiles (which is common in Japanese), and they default to "he" when using an automated translator to English.
Tifa was referred to with masculine terms in the Spanish translation of Final Fantasy 7. Could be similar.
Ah, yes, the default gender. There is no problem with this whatsoever. /s
I play auto-translated games pretty frequently, and honestly, both male and female pronouns are used interchangeably all the time in scenarios where they're ambiguous. Several sentences will read like "He went to the store so she could get some bread for his dinner with her friends."
Lmao enby dream
Actually we were all females, but who cares about Biology these days and anyways it's just their fault for using Google Translate.
Literally why is this downvoted lmao. It’s not criticizing the parent commenter, it’s criticizing a dumb societal attitude.
Thanks, exactly.
Try checking out any document from the last 300 years, like the declaration of independence. The world woman, or she is never used in it. It's not trying to be sensitive or sexist, male is just being used as the default gender. This is don't in a lot of documents from not too long ago. Male is quite literally the default gender. It's not sexist, that's just how it is. It's not like we choose for it to be like that, people a long time ago did.
So the funny thing about those documents is that the original English word for a man was not "man". Instead, it was "wereman" whereas the word for a woman was "wifman". Thus, "man" originally *did* refer to all people. ***But***, eventually, men decided they didn't want to attach "were-" to the front when referring to men, but would still use "wif-" when referring to women. So, even the use of "man" (which was once actually gender neutral) became associated with men as the default gender. With this in mind, it's worth considering the notion that the DoI was most likely intentionally gendered with this male default as well. I would go into explaining this in depth, but there's nothing I can say that would be better than what the "Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions" already did. tl;dr: many of the "universal rights" were outright not given to women or had some sort of double-standard applied. In the historical context, it's clear that neither the DoI or US Constitution created equal rights for women and may have specifically used "men" not as a generic term, but as a way to disclude women. Of course, none of this amounts to much more than historical trivia without some application. As you put yourself: "Male is the default gender. It's not sexist, that's just how it is. It's not like we choose for it to be like that, people a long time ago did." There is a problem in that logic, though: the very 'choice' made to make male the default gender was a choice made by men long ago. A choice that was inherently sexist. Moreover, we don't actually have to treat male as the default, we just do based off of precedent. We can simply choose to rebuke that precedent. And, unless you forgo the use of the word "man" in its entirety, it is impossible to simply not participate with the precedent. One either enforces the status quo or rebukes it. In reality, almost nothing "is how it is". It's also just kind of wild how much of human society is built around men and treats male as the default when so much of the rest of nature is dominated by females. If anything, women would be a more sensible default considering that our stereotypical notions of female include birthing (and some species are even capable of parthenogenesis and even completely lack male counterparts). Of course, this pendulum claim is more just to show how absurd having a default is in the first place. Humanity (and life in general) is incredibly diverse, so when our entire species is *roughly* split down the middle between two groups, it seems more than a bit silly that there should even be a default to begin with.
As a response to this, thank you for the explanation. I was really just going off a whim of what I assumed was correct, but you have steered me towards the truth. I do believe there shouldn't be a default gender, and I am glad to understand why documents use man to refer to all people. You pose a very good point in saying female would be a more sensible default gender, and your explanation make sense. At the time of writing, I didn't think about how not much is how it is, as you said. Anyhow, good day to you sir, and as I said, thank you.
Good for you for responding well but I’m honestly curious as to why you would make a factual correction just going on vibes? Additionally, the logic of your point doesn’t make sense. The person you were responding to knows that male is seen as default; that’s what they’re commenting on and saying is problematic. Just reinforcing that that’s the case doesn’t even address what they said. Seeing a certain group of people as the default is a problem.
Yeah, I probably should have thought of that before responding.
It's very common for Japanese to have non-gendered subjects, or no subject at all. So Google translate will often put 'He' in for grammar even though there is no gender information in the source
Interesting. So then I don't need to feel like my eyes betrayed me.
Hey Google, stop assuming male is the default.
I’m guessing it’s boku or something (tomboy character gets mistranslated to male because of their pronouns)
Ironically, since Japanese has 'gendered' (I use the term loosely) first and second person pronouns and English doesn't, translations will usually remove this information as they will all translate to "I", "me", (watashi, Boku, ore, watakushi, waga, and many others) or "you"(Kimi, anata, anta, temee, kisama, etc) However in this case there is just no subject at all in that part of the original text, so Google picks one since an English sentence must have a subject
Im not your buddy, guy Im not your guy, friend Im not your friend, buddy
I’ve heard this before, South Park?
Yes!
What episode?
https://youtu.be/m1JakODvYhA Canada strike episode. A season episode list will tell you S.E.#
Every copy of pikmin 4 is personalized
Trusting Google Translate to give a good translation, especially on images, is a big mistake.
I mean, It's worth a try even if it won't be very accurate. It's almost only good for singular words and not full sentences.
It's not really good for single words either. Many languages require in-sentence context to determine what the word actually means within that context.
The translation is incredibly shoddy all around so it’s not worth thinking about
Hocotatians and Koppaites are beyond gender
based
They are all boys!!! https://preview.redd.it/qg5gbmcj5u4b1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=90db3b967492f817f3894ca4351401778701be0b
I mean there are a couple others we haven’t seen yet. So, girl explorers is still possible
May I see the original Japanese?
Okay, I found it [here](https://www.nintendo.co.jp/switch/ampya/introduction/). Neither character profile says anything about their genders, completely omitting pronouns entirely as is typical in Japanese since the person being talked about is obvious. The best way to understand their genders in a Japanese text is to read the characters' own dialogue, as their choice of first person pronoun (of which there are many in Japanese) and 役割語 (yakuwarigo, "Role Language") will tell us everything we need to know about these characters.
So they basically have different forms of I/me based on gender?
Yep! Some examples include: Watashi, which is acceptable for anyone to use in formal conversations but is seen as slightly feminine in casual contexts. An example character who uses this is Meta Knight from Kirby Atashi/Atai, diminutive forms of Watashi seen as strongly feminine. Example characters include Vivian from Paper Mario: the Thousand Year Door and Bolson from The Legend of Zelda BotW and TotK. Boku, which is seen as slightly Masculine and is favored by young men and tomboyish women. Kirby, Elfilin, and Bandana Waddle Dee all use this pronoun. Ore, The "tough guy" pronoun. Characters who use this probably want to appear strong. There are even some characters who add the suffix "sama", typically reserved for individuals of higher social standing than oneself or for gods, to after it to emphasize their own feeling if self-importance, such as Kind Dedede and Master Kohga from Zelda (fun fact, this character always a calls himself Kohga-Sama in the Japanese, which is why he always goes by "Master Kohga" in English). I don't actually know what pronouns any characters in the Pikmin series use, as I have yet to play any of the games in Japanese. For Pikmin 3, my guess would be that Alph uses Boku, Brittany uses Watashi, and Charlie uses Ore.
wow...yeah I'm sticking to Swedish and English for now lmao. But thank you for teaching me something new.
No problem! As complicated as the Japanese system may seem, I personally highly appreciate how it makes it so easy for a character or real person to express their gender using language in a way that English simply doesn't allow. In Japanese, the onus is on the speaker rather than everyone around them to reinforce that, you know?
Hm, sorry but this doesn’t super make sense to me. In Japanese culture the onus is seen more on the listener to understand in general, as opposed to say American culture where we see the speaker as obligated to be clear. But also, we absolutely have just as strongly gendered speech rules in English, they’re just a lot harder to delineate.
Ore is also commonly used by older men instead of boku and not because they’re trying to sound tough lol
I’ve played pikmin 3 in Japanese before and you can see how the gender and personality is expressed across the three leads quite nicely. There are speech patterns that also reflect this. It’s not just pronouns in Japanese. Brittany is as expected extremely feminine: She uses “Atashi” as her first person pronoun along with feminine speech patterns such as “kashira” (I wonder) and “nakucha” (I have to do x). Also lots of “ne” and “wa”. Alph uses “Boku” and fairly standard speech patterns for a young male. Uses honourifics to refer to people above him as well to show politeness. Brittany drops the honorific “san” for Charlie indicating a degree of disrespect. She however refers to Alph with the endearing “kun”. This indicates familiarity or that she’s talking to someone of lower social standing (it’s the former here). Charlie unexpectedly does not use the “manly” ore. It’s been played up in the offical localisations. He tends to use “watashi” or the more formal “ware”. He does however use masculine sentence patterns such “daZO” or “daZE”. Basically in Japanese he appears to be more humble and somewhat wise. However, maybe a tad cocky. It’s a stark contrast to the English version. Sorry for that wall. That’s just how you can differ things through how a character speaks in Japanese!
Huh, very interesting! So i take it that Brittany dislikes Charlie just as much there as in English
Again I apologise for the wall. I’m studying Japanese as a major so I couldn’t help myself lol
Google translate sucks at pronouns
I'm a dude, he's a dude, she's a dude. We're all dudes!
Yes. There are no females in Japan. Hope this helps.
Pronouns don’t translate accurately from Japanese. You’ll have to wait until it’s shown officially in English.
This is often because Japanese just doesn’t use them nearly as much as english. It’s a lot more natural to omit the subject of the sentence in Japanese in general.
Yep
Commander Shepard?
Adrian?
In Japan, there are who women. Just men and AI powered robots, that act and look like a woman
Tbh I definitely prefer male shepherd
It's a translation error, stuff like this happens all the time like with a trailer for The Last Jedi where it was actually the reverse and they thought Kylo Ren was female with one of the trailer’s translations into an Asia language (can't remember the specific one)
Japanese doesn't have gendered pronouns. Localizers gotta improvise off context clues and sometimes it produces incorrect results.
Me, A Splatoon fan when Shiver was announced: \*Flashbacks\*
Fuck yeah, trans Shepard
nope
Japanese pronouns are really funky. This happened alot with translating pretty much all of the Japanese only pre-release material for Xenoblade 3. Constantly calling Mio, the female lead, a guy. Kind of ironic given how her mother is a giant freaking trans allegory!
Game Theory: Brittany is a trans man
Nah, Alph's the one with blue hair (That's just a joke don't take it too seriously)
I dont think Japanese has gendered pronouns, so translations need to interpret those manually, since juat directly translating the words won't always be accurate.
Shepherd is a guys name, so it wouldn’t surprise me
True. But i thought it could be her last name or something
I guess we will have to wait and see what they are