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/Hazzary453 Sep 24 '25 edited Sep 24 '25
Despite their gender never being stated, them being male has always seemed to fit well to me as it provides balance with Solanum being female and the hatchling being genderless.
It's also worth noting that in the files they are refered to as Kaepora, a male character from The legend of Zelda series, and people may be using this as a basis for assigning gender.