False connections

Something I see occasionally that irks me: people find an interview with a game designer where they're asked something along the lines of, "What is the gender of the player character?" The dev responds, "The character was designed to be androgynous, and is not a boy or a girl." This is interpreted by some fans as the dev saying that the character is specifically nonbinary—while I'm sympathetic to the impulse to seek out this kind of representation, I think in most cases this reading is inaccurate, and treating it as the Word of God is going to result in the weird (but again, understandable) defensiveness that arises around protecting the sanctity of a "canon" marginalized identity as well as potential disappointment when the same dev catches wind of the words that have been put in their mouth and decides to issue a statement to the contrary.

In most cases, I believe this is what is meant: "This character was intended to be read as either a boy or a girl depending on how the player wants to view them. Therefore, I am not going to give a specific answer to the question." Does that preclude players from mapping different identities onto the character? Of course not, and even if preventing that were the designer's prerogative, there's nobody to stop you from doing it (whether or not you should disregard canon for this in any given case is, of course, a separate issue). Could you call that a description of a bigender or nonbinary identity? Sure, but that's clearly not what was meant.

This sort of situation (and I'm referring particularly to this sort of situation, and not those in which nonbinary gender is directly ascribed to a character—a useful example is the divergent characterizations of Frisk in Undertale, which is an absence of coded gender as described here, and Kris in Deltarune, which is a case of an explicitly, actively nonbinary character) reads to me as an attempt to catch the creator in a trap and say, "Aha! So you endorse my headcanon on a technicality!" This is obviously ridiculous, and so is getting into fights online over the identity of a fictional character. I bring that up because there are two reasons why you'd want the creator's endorsement in the first place, and if it's not for the sake of knowing that your own interpretation is endorsed, it's for the sake of using it as a trump card in such fights. Since neither of these desires are fully sated by a fallacy, it's self-defeating to treat extant comments like this as "evidence" of anything. ~∓~

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