Got into an argument with someone over whether a character is "non-binary."
The character's name is Zoe Hange, from Attack On Titan.
According to this other guy, in the manga in Japanese, for some reason Zoe's sex is apparently never specified, thus this guy insists on referring to her with they/them crap--he also uses this as justification for that whole Yamato thing. "See? Other series do this. Get educated."
The anime, however, explicitly makes Zoe female, and voiced by women in both Japanese and English--were she non-binary, she likely would have been voiced in English by someone who claims to be such, like Michelle Rojas or Marianne Miller (now calling herself Marin Miller), but instead she is dubbed by Jessica Calvello, who is a normal woman.
Yet this guy only refers to Zoe Hange as "they" and crap like that.
I am not into Attack On Titan. Not my thing. But unlike One Piece's Yamato, I can't find word from the original creator on this, and I don't trust sites like TV Tropes to tell me the truth here. Thus, I turn to you.
If the mods feel the need to remove this, I will understand. I'm just not sure who else I could ask this.
Here's how you win the argument. You say this to your friend: "I think I've figured it out. You're unsure of your own sexuality and you're going through a phase where you want to experiment with men but you're trying to take baby steps. You happen to have a crush on this obviously female character but by pretending she is non-binary, it allows you to experiment with the thought of being gay while still maintaining plausible deniability in your mind that you aren't gay because the character looks so obviously female."
Won't work.
I know this guy in real life. He's already bisexual.
Tell them to stop being a bitch, put some effort into their shitty fetish and go find themselves a katoey.
My advice would be to stop knowing him in real life.
She's a woman, it's clear in both mediums she's a woman, there's no they/them crap in the series despite body changers in the form of Titan shifters.
If anything she's kind of autistic in her desire to know EVERYTHING about the titans where to the outside of her personal circle of colleagues it looks like she has a twisted fetish about them.
Spoiler: this obsession moves onto learning more about the outside world when they learn THERE IS an outside world but after Eren's actions and the return to the island it shifts to trying to convince Eren not to genocide the world then stopping him which ends in her sacrifice so that her colleagues could escape. Nowhere in the series is she referred to as non-binary as there's no such character in the series, you just have some people so obsessed with their personal goals they ignore relationships but they still recognise they are male/female.
Oh boy does this remind me how the show went downhill fast after season 1.
What's in Eren's dad's basement??? Oh the good old days
i dont think it went downhill after season 1 i think it went down hill after the certain big event halfway in season 4
Yeah, this is probably a better take. But wow! Up until about that point, the Manga was fantastic.
The decade old American concept of "nonbinary" (along with "trans", "genderfluid", etc) doesn't exist in Japan in any meaningful way and any similarities are merely coincidences. Japanese genderbending stuff has absolutely no cultural or historical connection to modern Western queerness. If you try this argument on somebody online who is passionately arguing that an Attack on Titan character is nonbinary it will almost definitely fail, though.
Has a female name, behaves like a woman, looks like a woman, acts like a woman, sounds like a woman, leads like a woman( she's a terribly incompetent leader, she even admits this herself) and she appeals to emotions more than logic.
She's a woman.
And ask him why he's watching a show that's end message (Spoilers ahead)
is to genocide all your people's enemies (not just 80%) or else your enemies will genocide you.
You 'win' by not having this argument, this is somebodies' sex fantasy playing out and the weirdo is trying to enforce it on other people by arguing about it. It's the equivalent of when women fantasise about their favourite characters being gay, it's almost certainly a fetish and the guy is taking it too far and you've already enabled his behaviour. Really the only one who can even decide that sort of thing in the first place anyway is the creator themselves, the rest is just nerdy fan fiction and that's what this is.
In the manga, Zoe was originally referred to as a woman, before being retconned into being "ambiguous." It's faggotry and parasitism, as usual, and whoever you're arguing with is a waste of good fertilizer.
Also, AoT turned out to be garbage pretty early on, and your first clue to never interact with an AoT fan should have been how many she/theys and fujos love that emo fag commander who looks like he's about to fall asleep.
Levi is supposed to have a thousand yard stare. For some reason that translated into looking tired.
It blowing up so quickly made it suspicious. The first few chapters/ anime episode looked promising of a concept, but couldn't see how it was going to be a sort of long-runner. Still surprised it lasted so long.
Probably because at the time zombie apocalypse stories were all the rage and titans are basically giant zombies. The story telling is good. The good thing about it is that its not a never ending story about fighting titans, it eventually does move on as a story in to why the titans exist, what they are , and they actually do defeat all the titans and find out the truth about where they come from, who the real enemies are and the story gets more interesting from there.
I couldn't understand how since the series never interested me beyond the surface, but with these points it makes a lot more sense now. Thank you!
How the fuck is anyone gonna say her gender is ambiguous? SHE HAS FUCKING BREASTS!
She was an autistic tomboy at best and everyone here know what happens to tomboys in $CurrentYear.
As far as I'm aware, the manga author, Hajime Isayama has stated that "either one is fine" which implies using either he or she. That said, it feels more like Isayama was going for some "open to interpretation" bullshit like "do you see a duck or a rabbit".
That just sounds like he was planning to make it like the World War Z book or 40k books where it's written like from a personal recollection than the standard neutral observer position.
That's how the game is presented, through the player characters' journal where the narrator states that the soldiers name and even sex are lost to history.
if the author apparently said "either one is fine" then that implies female or male and not non binary.
Japan has multiple gendered pronouns per gender, and often times people will use the wrong gender as a point about personality. Mion from Higurashi literally calls herself oji-san (old man/uncle), for an example.
That's why them never specifying or even what they do specify is meaningless. Japan isn't afraid of making traps, or joke trannies, or even just actual gender swapped characters. They'd let you know outright if that was intentional.
Crona from Soul Eater is a great example of what it looks like when they deliberately are trying to not specify. Its obvious they are doing it, the characters in universe note that they don't know, and the creator tells you outright nobody knows. Heck some series will have entire episodes about it, just to drive the point home.
At the end of the day, he is just a retard. You can't take a language so different from English and try to apply English cultural norms to its usage. Japan is filled with untranslatable details that English just straight up can't handle and then get lost even in the most faithful translation. It either gets dropped or gets made so heavy it feels cumbersome.
No one is "non-binary". It's a retarded concept for boring faggots to pretend like they have something that makes them interesting
I just ask them if they're hexadecimal or one I never put enough effort into.
Apparently the manga author thought "either sex is okay" and the anime and other works tend to make the character more feminine. Source is this tweet.
Even the My Anime List character entry is infected with the crazy:
https://myanimelist.net/character/71121/Hange_Zoë
My advice is to distance yourself from the person you were arguing with. They are clearly mentally deranged. Their stupidity can contribute to your downfall in ways that you cannot predict.
It's 100% impossible to find any wiki or database about any kind of media that isn't moderated by queer folks at this point. Even the Star Wars wiki has pronouns and freaks who aggressively use singular they for characters.
Because they're NEETs who can squat on wikis and everything else while everyone else actually goes about doing things with their lives.
"We actually have JOBS" is retarded cope. There are plenty of unemployed right wing gamers too.
Right wing autism online largely extends towards the ADHD-focused internet sphere rather than autistic places like wikis, they prefer imageboards and more ephemeral places and making memes rather than writing screeds of text on a wiki that some mod will change in a heartbeat and then ban them for (unless its vandalizing said wiki)
Tell him that he is being insensitive to Japanese culture by claiming the female is the gender she is not just because he refuses to see the character for who she actually is. Japanese manga writers tend to not point out sex because it is always assumed based on features. Unless they’re trying to be edgy, funny, or over exaggerate on their appearance.
People like him also need to stop making their fanfiction reality. It’s ruining our enjoyment of the medium.
In general the best approach I think is "Who's on first?"
"Then Zoe said whatever and they did the thing"
"Zoe... and who else?"
"Just Zoe"
"So she did it"
"No they did it"
"But you said it was just Zoe"
Then "they" will get mad at you and that's good. They'll either fuck off or use the right pronoun maybe just in your presence, but that's a start. Either way problem solved.
The character is titanosexual, in both preference and identity. She cares not about pronouns, he can be called whatever you may like to call her, because xie doesn't fucking care. Which is significantly different than "non-binary". It's putting "fuck you, I don't care, call me whatever you want" in the bio, rather than pronouns in the bio.
She has a vagina, and she'd love for it to be stretched by a Titan, sure, but little pronoun games and stupidity like that aren't of interest to her. Someone insisting she needs some specific pronoun would likely be more offensive than people just labelling her whatever they may feel like at any given point in time, because the former causes conflict, and thus may interfere with her own life.
Non-binary isn't real. End of argument
Why is the character drawn to be obviously feminine and voiced by exclusively females if it is meant to be ambiguous?
For real.
The Japanese can get a (very convincing-sounding, but still hinting) dude to voice characters like traps if they do so, one of the most famous examples is Chihiro in Danganronpa.
The way gender-bending ambiguity is handled in Japanese media could more legitimately be called "non-binary' than the American claim of "non-binary" which merely creates another binary class of sexuality.
Of course the Japanese don't call it non-binary, so it's not. (in fact non-binary isn't a thing, so we can only assume a character is male or female and we simply don't know which)