User:Strxwberrycat

we are women. ya hear that? she/her pronouns you lot.

intro
we have played gears and all of the blade games, including torna and future connected. we spend a lot of time trying to optimise combat on our own; we dont do any leaderboard or community stuff, it's just a past time we enjoy on my own. our favourite part of the series is the depiction of mental health and psychology

writing info!
we have not completed gears (disc 2 moment), and so what we write about these is likely to have oversights because a lack of knowledge. in general, we prefer doing minor edits, because it is easy to focus on one small thing all at once that we are actively thinking about! for the sake of being free from the shackles of capitalism (fandom wiki), though, we do our best to write complete pages on our own as well, to help make this wiki more complete! just starting is the hardest part.

writing stances
we may not act on these, but believe in them intensely regardless.

Character gender is useless information for the most part. Xenoblade 2 has by far the most justification technically because of Merc missions, which also provide a streamlined way of finding character gender. We believe it is only added to wiki pages to be encyclopaedic, but don't think it deserves the level of notoriety it gets right under character art.

Even if gender does serve a purpose it's important to remember that gender is separate from pronouns. for the most part, this doesn't matter, because gender is what you'd expect from someone's pronouns. in the case of someone like Juniper, who's gender is listed as unspecified, with the primary justification being pronouns either being nonbinary (ie., neither he/him she/her), or varies between binary pronouns if a language doesn't have a nonbinary option. This doesn't make their gender unspecified, as pronouns don't indicate gender. the citation also says that internally, Juniper's gender is non binary (literally neither 0 or 1), which is closer to being actually unspecified, but that still doesn't mean the gender is actually unspecified. We think that some wiki writers could learn a thing or two about how languages and pronouns work, and how gender is psychological based on socialisation and even varies between cultures as a result.

another thing we believe strongly is that character art can sometimes poorly represent a character, and that having their renders appear as primary images on their character pages is much, much better. This is particularly the case for Xenoblade 2 and 3.

Older games can get away with this because the art seems more consistent with the game style, and because lower quality in game character representation.

In blade 2 and 3, the art can vary specifically from the game's art style, making characters like, again, Juniper, look extremely different from what a player actually sees in the game. The renders are much more consistent with each other and also the game, and are much more useful as visual shorthand. It's probably okay to have tab thing that lets you choose what to display.

favourite characters
warning! this section has unmarked game spoilers.

bart bart bart bart bart bart bart Mia is really autistic and earnest and we love it so much. we love mia. a lot more important to us than the other characters we like, like nagi. Pneuma is a really good depiction of depression and dissociative identity disorder. we think most parallels between gears and the blade games are more effective as a piece of art and storytelling in gears, because the blade games use subtext whereas gears is often extremely direct in its storytelling, but this is one major exception! fei and their system are explicitly DID, and pneuma are not. xc2 does a really good job incorporating the way their brain works and functions into its storytelling, without ever saying they are plural, traumatised or depressed. citan uzuki i swear to god ever hear of subtext man. this is probably something that is victim of mid localisation, but,, regardless, the version of xenogears we played used fei being plural as a plot device and did so while making the characters in that system stereotypical and harmful caricatures. pyra and mythra are really natural characters in terms of writing and the subtext is really good for the story and their character. they are important. fiona this girl has some kind of mental illness and we dont know what we just love them