Monetka_
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Minnie's Custom
Coldsnap, Sapphire & Lake taking a walk in the gardens and stopping to take pictures of the flowers (and each other).
- Thread starter Jacquesdor
- Start date
Minnie's Custom
Coldsnap, Sapphire & Lake taking a walk in the gardens and stopping to take pictures of the flowers (and each other).
JJ1960
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HornyyPussy
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Here is my humble opinion about this, no intention to start a fight:
The usage of the term "actor" when referring to a woman was not a natural evolution of the English language, but was pushed hard in media, Hollywood movies, certain schools in the US, etc.
They also pushed hard for gender neutral pronouns like
xe/xem/xyrs
ze/zir/zirs
Per/Per/Pers
and many other things which won't be mentioned here.
This is nothing but indoctrination through language manipulation about which George Orwell warned us in his famous "1984" novel.
In the gaming world, in the last 2 years or so, there has been a lot of push back against all this from gamers, "influencers", etc..
We have seen big games like
Concord
Assassin' Creed Shadows
etc
failing because they pushed the same ideology onto gamers.
Even in the last "The Game Awards" show, the biggest gaming show of the year, they used "actress" several times to refer to women.
The link below is such an example (there were several):
You must be registered to see the links
When this game started development (2 years ago or more), it might have looked like using "actor/hero" instead of "actress/heroin" for a woman is the "new standard" but there have been quite a lot of important changes since then.
Just my humble opinion, I'm not trying to start a fight.
Best of the luck to the developer, I enjoyed his game a lot and will probably buy it on Steam.
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Rehwyn
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I get what you’re saying about language being influenced by media and institutions. That part’s fair. Language doesn’t just evolve randomly, and professional spaces definitely have a hand in shaping what becomes common.
Where I think this gets overstated is treating neutral job titles like "actor" or "superhero" as the same thing as neopronouns. Those aren’t really moving through language in the same way. Using “actor” or “superhero” is mostly about describing a role that doesn’t change based on gender, and that shift has been happening gradually for decades. Neopronouns are a much narrower, newer thing and still pretty rare by comparison.
I also don’t think hearing “actress” at awards shows is some kind of sign that neutral language is being rejected. To me it just looks like language still being in transition. You see mixed usage all the time during transitions. For example, The Game Awards already use a gender-neutral “Best Performance” category for voice acting, and a woman won it this year - so neutral recognition clearly hasn’t gone away, even if spoken delivery isn’t perfectly consistent yet.
Bringing it back to Origin Story, the game using “superhero” for a female character doesn’t really strike me as ideological. It’s just a neutral role label, and it doesn’t erase the fact that she’s a woman or change anything about the character or story. It’s closer to using “doctor” or “soldier” by default than making any kind of statement.
So I guess my honest question is: do you think that wording actually affects how the character or story comes across in Origin Story, or is it mostly just a style choice you personally don’t like?
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The_Man_With_No_Name
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Language changes. Until the middle ages, English had a word for a woman in "wifman" and a word for a guy being "wereman" with "man" being neutral for a person or something relating to people. "Manpower" or " the race of men" being neutral terms that still follow that logic.
Having neutral descriptors for roles or actions isn't that far off from how English has been used. Like you said, occupational titles usually aren't gendered in English. And when they are it's usually loan terms from other languages.