Thread:PassionatePubli/@comment-31642501-20200520080058/@comment-32094364-20200520141801

Okay, well, first of all, I'm very glad you're speaking to me about this on a more reasonable level and am grateful for it. There are some people that just completely flip out and it makes discussion really hard when all I want is a legitimate talk about this to see if we can come to an understanding.

The reason I was being so hostile with that person was (for lack of better wording) they were harassing me. They divebombed all my social media sending me hate messages and refusing to speak to me on any reasonable terms (they also came back to call me a pedophile for stating that it was incredibly likely that Firecracker was meant to be a kid, but look where we are now with that...sigh), and had already been banned from the discord for spewing a lot of hate. It was kind of unfortunately very obvious where they were coming from (not actual nb support) because they referred to Plum and Millennial Tree being revealed as male as "incidents." Normally I would not...talk down to someone like that, so the aggression was more an "oh my god, can you just leave me alone" kind of thing.

However I will say there are definitely misunderstandings on both sides. So I'll try to address your bolded points, sorry if I leave anything out.

Transphobe thing, yes you are absolutely right that trans people can be transphobic. As I explained above that person was harassing me so I was just getting snarky with them because they were immediately throwing a bunch of nasty labels at me because they just assumed I was some crazy cis person or something.

Moving on from that though, Angel, yes. Angel is actually a weird one because back in LINE days Devsis made a statement about it on their now deleted tumblr account essentially saying they originally translated Angel as female but then realized it would be more appropriate to make Angel it/its because it is "above the human concept of gender" being that angels aren't really human etc, which makes sense! So yeah, it's kind of interesting? However they did totally shred Cinnamon from the transition to Ovenbreak, and they silently deleted Peppermint and Snow Sugar's pronouns out one day. This actually wasn't even in their transfers to Ovenbreak, they were completely normal for a while then one day I noticed some text had been changed on Macaron's description and wanted to see if anyone else had changed, and yeah, they had deleted any pronoun references out of those two descriptions. That was when I started to think something wasn't quite right with the English translations. Like, why would they do that, you get me? They could easily have put they/them if they were going to delete it/its (and indeed I think I would've respected that decision, it wouldn't have been weird) but instead they took everything out and even clipped out a chunk of Peppermint's description that I guess was impossible to word without pronouns?

The problem with relying on the original Korean is that it's not a heavily gendered language, so while you can use it for some genders if a gendered term is used, a lot of the time the Korean fanbase actually relies on the JPN or ENG translation for genders. A good example of this is when Gumball came out in Kakao, and the KR fanbase argued over his gender for a good while until he was released in LINE and officially stated to be male. I think this is actually trivia on one of the KR wikis (which are run in a pretty different fashion from English wikis so it's considered totally valid trivia), but gosh, I don't remember which one, I could try to dig it up.

Roguefort messes with me. I feel bittersweet every time I think about that cookie, because Roguefort is such a good design and it would be so cool to have a nonbinary phantom thief. The reason I'm always wavery with Roguefort is...well, every single other language, even the aformentioned KR with its usually ungendered terms, calls Roguefort a male in some way, with JPN even going so far as to use kare (彼), which is a pretty explicit term for a guy (I researched this one for a while to make sure...). And considering Roguefort is in a disguise and was lying to Yogurt Cream about their identity, I can't help but worry that later down the line Roguefort is going to get that costume where they're out of disguise and someone's going to say something to the effect of "wow, who's he?" and, well, that would be that. (esp. because Sandwich's costume disguise uses they/them) Which would absolutely suck and I think can't stop haunting the back of my mind. I don't want to mark a character as confirmed nonbinary when I can't be confident in it and then have that happen. We already had the noodle incident with Dark Choco. (which also sucked and I was actually really upset about at the time)

Ah yes, the Japanese thing...is actually...meant to be trivia. I think this is a misunderstanding a lot of people...kind of didn't understand...actually, coming to think about it...

Let me try to explain further...so, see, the idea was always for the unspecified cookies (NOT for the confirmed nonbinary ones, I don't touch those because personally I think it would be offensive) that I would put trivia that there's discrepancy between languages on how the cookie is translated in regards to gender, since this is kind of what happened with Dark Choco.

Contextually, I think a lot of people weren't around for Dark Choco, so what the case with him was, for about two years (since Dark Choco was an initial release to Ovenbreak), similar to a lot of other cookies right now, he had nothing referring to a gender or anything in his description so at the time we assumed nonbinary and that was how the cookie was labled on the wiki. Cue Purple Yam's release and...oh no. That's a lot of "he" being mentioned suddenly. At that point, since Cinnamon's release and changes had already happened, I was a little confused and hurt, and looked into if every single other cookie without pronouns (which at the time I think was Fig, DJ, Snow Sugar, and Peppermint) was like this. And they were. And they kept being like that with later releases. And at this point I was like, well if this happened to Dark Choco I can't reasonably assume these characters are then designed to be nonbinary. But I still didn't WANT to say they definitely weren't, so I established an unspecified category to make it clear, "hey these characters haven't been confirmed to be something yet but that doesn't mean they can't be anything so I'm not stating any definites" and included the Japanese translation because it's the one I'd argue is closest to the original Korean (there are some...interesting. Choices in other languages that make them pretty unreliable, Japanese usually lines up with English when it comes to gender aside from the unspecified cookies). But again, this was never intended to be scripture for people to follow by, it was just "hey, this thing is different in this language!" for like, trivia. This is actually pretty common to point out on wikia. (See: Saharah from Animal Crossing, a character changed from male to female for the English translation, or there's a character I won't name from an anime, due to obvious transphobia, that is a trans woman in the original JPN but ENG changes it to male...yeah that one was yikes)

So in my situation and viewpoint, it's really not "this character should be defined by their gender in JPN and you should follow by that and nothing else." To me it's "this character is considered such and such in JPN. You can use this how you want, maybe you want to know the gender the character was assigned at birth for trans headcanons, maybe you want to know for nonbinary headcanons (ex: making Pitaya they/he), heck, maybe it's just something for you to know about and then immediately discard because it's not important information for English for the time being and it may never be." It's not meant to be gospel and it never was. I think...that's what a lot of people misunderstood, which is unfortunate.

But again, yes, sorry for the initial hostility to that person in my message. A lot of what I said came off as callous and damaging because I didn't want to give them the time of day after their behavior, and that's on me. (but they shouldn't have resorted to petty name-calling with VERY brutal terms to use right out of the gate) I hope this makes sense and makes it more obvious that these decisions come with thought behind them and aren't just me putting whatever misinfo I want on the wiki. A lot of it also stemmed from frustration towards Devsis (which I still think in many ways isn't completely misguided, but I think some of it may have been towards the fandom rather than them, and I shouldn't have taken it out wholly on them) and again, that's on me. Thank you for your time in typing this out and actually just being polite with me. Again, I hope this kind of helps to show where I'm coming from and why I'm so unwilling to put indefinites for characters, because it's already been shown that things can be changed so quickly in a mobile game series like this. And I hope it's...a little more clear that the additional language genders are just there because...yeah, they're trivia. Not trying to state the character might not actually genuinely be revealed to be nonbinary.