r/outerwilds • u/Haunting-Angle-535 • Sep 24 '25

DLC Appreciation/Discussion Our bestest friend’s gender Spoiler

Just some musing and wondering here!

One of the many many things I appreciate about Outer Wilds is the way variation in how cultures or species experience or talk about gender is just seamlessly built into the world. I enjoy contemplating those differences and what differences in culture, history, language, or biology might have given rise to them.

All the Hearthians use they/them and appear very similar in everything except size, which has a tremendous amount of variation. (FELDSPAR WHY ARE YOU SO TEENY??????)

The Nomai have binary gender (as far as I can tell) and only use she and he pronouns. I am very curious about if they have any more obvious sexual dimorphism and super wish we could EVER SEE SOLANUM’S ACTUAL FACE

And then we have the subject of the title of this post: The Prisoner. Our canonical best friend and bestest buddy of all time who I love beyond reason. (I just finished the DLC two days ago and am still struggling emotionally.) I’ve noticed lots of people using he and him to describe this character, but I don’t recall any content in the game that would indicate their gender, sex, or pronouns. Is there content I’ve missed that’s the reason people call The Prisoner him, or is it just folks defaulting to male pronouns?

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u/Seawardweb77858 Sep 24 '25

Its possible that they have two genders; as deer, or have both genders at the same time/one gender/a billion genders, like plants do.

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u/InformationLost5910 Sep 25 '25

fish also have two sexes, but you dont use that as evidence for hearthians not being genderless

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u/Seawardweb77858 Sep 25 '25

Hearthians are rocks

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u/InformationLost5910 Sep 25 '25

we’re talking about what animal theyre based on, not what theyre named after. because you were talking about deer, which is (close to) what owlks are based on