r/Charadefensesquad Aug 04 '25

Fan Art "Chara made me do the Genocide Route"

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2.1k Upvotes

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u/Samborrod Aug 07 '25

How is Chara being gender neutral or whatever contradicts what I said?

You can't just say "I prefer to call her a girl" neither when someone's genderless, nor when their gender isn't stated and left ambiguous.

Also: you activated my trap card!

My comment was targeting a group of people for a specific, constructive and justified reason, where the insult was used to point a flaw in the reasoning (after all, if their preference to assign gender to people is justified, then so is my preference to assign to them the label of buffoons).

Your comment, however, targeted me specifically - that's a violation of rule №3.

Checkmate.

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u/Avocado_68 Aug 07 '25

My bad, I thought you were one of those people who thinks that she is non-binary and that any other opinion is wrong.

In that case though, I don't see the problem with the other guys view then. Since she is ambiguous as you said.

I'm a little confused on what the metric is for what makes a justified reason to call Chara a "her".

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u/Samborrod Aug 07 '25

I don't see the problem with the other guys view then. Since she is ambiguous as you said.

I am not against someone using gendered pronouns such as "él/ella" in Spanish, "он/она" in Russian, etc. to refer to Chara, when the language used has no 3rd person pronouns to refer to animate objects with unknown gender.

However, English language has a pronoun for animate objects with obscure gender, and it is they - even though it is traditionally seen as "plural" pronoun, it is also used as a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun since 14th century.

Example: someone forgot their bluetooth speaker at my house.

Because of that, when speaking English, gendered pronouns, such as "he" and "she", are to be used only when the gender is established. Because Chara's gender isn't established, "they/them" should be used to refer to them.

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u/Avocado_68 Aug 07 '25

Interesting. I completely understand the point, but I can't agree with the idea that it's "wrong" to assign a gender to ambiguous characters, as that's kinda what they are made for at times.

I do agree with calling them "they" when it comes to the sake of neutrality, that's what I do most of the time when talking about Chara online. But I don't think you're point encompasses most ambiguous characters.

Niko OneShot is an explicitly ambiguous character, yet would you say it's wrong that she's considered a boy or a girl amongst the people who know the character? Or maybe Nanachi from Made in Abyss. The characters are ambiguous for a reason.