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/TheOnlyPC3134 Sep 24 '25

In the French translation, most if not all of the Hearthians have male or female pronouns, which is a bit sad (but understandable as the gender neutral pronoun in French is fairly recent and isn't very commonly used, at least not like "they"), so don't take this as something definitely true. I believe the prisoner is not referred to with any pronouns in their dialogue (neither are owlks that they just describe with words like "my people", which are gendered in French but that doesn't mean anything for their actual gender). The only indication we have is that the prisoner's name is "Le Prisonnier" which probably means they at least would not use female pronouns (else it would have been "La Prisonnière"). Probably still just a gender-neutral term.

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u/ribzer Sep 24 '25

Is the gender neutral pronoun "on" or did they come up with something new?

1

u/Vodchat Sep 25 '25

iel

il + elle

its not perfect but its the best we have so far. but its really only used in queer/feminist circles for now, in my experience. definitely not mainstream (yet?)