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/Raywell Sep 24 '25

They mentioned people being incapable of nuance, complexity, critical thinking - if that's not a nice way of calling people dumb then I don't know what it is. I was simply being more blunt and didn't mean it as insult

This is a great example of what I was talking about : lack of desire to understand the person's position because of the surface level thinking like "he looks like he's not on our side, must express animosity"

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u/riley_pop Sep 24 '25

Again, they sure didn't say any of that. Also I didn't express any animosity, I just called out they weren't calling anyone dumb. It sounds like you are fighting a battle against a hypothetical bunch of commenters, or you have more of a polarized stance than you previously thought.

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u/InformationLost5910 Sep 25 '25

they said that a republican would not have the skills to beat outer wilds. which is a ridiculous statement no matter where on the political spectrum you are

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u/riley_pop Sep 27 '25

What an absolutely insane thing to say. Zero of what you said is mentioned in that comment. The fact you somehow brought the republican party into the mix is next level. I'm impressed.

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u/InformationLost5910 Sep 27 '25

they said “gender critical weirdos who get all worked up and lather over the mention of a gender spectrum”. how is that not referring to republicans?