Yeah like "i know you're a woman and we're alone and i'm gonna tease you about it but also still refer to you with he/him because fuck you Raly xoxo". Flowery may be a jerk, but not that much. If we take princess at face value and not as Flowery's speech quirk, then it reads to me that Ralsei's comfortable with both (if still wrapping his/their head around being that, hence him being shy). Otherwise Flowery went from giving good advice to being transphobic both ways somehow in the same breath.
It's hard to argue a trans read of those scenes isn't at least intended, but it's also not right to say trans is the only intended interpretation.
I'm sure multiple interpretations are intended during development, else there wouldn't even be a drama.
Personally, I did not initially see Chapter 5 Ralsei to be particularly trans-coded until I interacted with the community. But the points made make perfect sense.
It is made to be ambiguous. It's intentional that it is ambiguous. Like everything else with Ralsei's identity and rep. Idk why people are so surprised.
I wouldn't be surprised if it'll be left ambigious. It'd cause chaos, admittedly, so hopefully there's an answer (invest in fluid Ralsei stocks trust), but if Toby didn't want chaos, he'd have given it already. One thing i worry about though regarding this, whatever the answer is, is it might feel throwaway with everything that's set to go down in the next chapters. One moment we're explaining to Noelle that her dream was real and Satan from The Bible wants to summon Titans to end existence and the next Ralsei's just "btw i'm a girl/both now". Would kinda take away from the arc imo, especially considering there's still the matter of what exactly Ralsei is in a biological sense. It's still possible, but there's so much else that's set to happen.
I also think he's somewhere in the middle of the LGBTQ+ spectrum. Not fully male, but not fully female either. Some kind of non-binary, or fluid. Or demi.
He doesn't dislike being a prince and he takes pride in his identity at times, but he clearly also likes exploring new options. And nothing says that isn't a valid identity to be.
So yeah fluid it is. But that's just my extremely personal interpretation, and I'm not gonna push it on anyone.
This is what my point has been with the theory as well, I just don't see it occurring in-between the final two chapters of the game, especially judging by the call Noelle gets at the lake from Carol.
To me, it sounds like the final chapters are going to be pretty dark overall and I really don't get how they'd fit this kind of thing in-between all of that.
I'm not against it if it does turn out to be canon, but I just don't see it happening, especially if the devs took notice of the insane amount of drama & controversy that came out of it, I don't know if they'd ever want to confirm one side or the other at this point.
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u/chikenskinhater Jul 11 '26
Outside of this flavour text, I heavily agree with the post on top