I read this post first like a month or two ago and it absolutely rewired how I thought about gender…

onlybylaura:tetrafelino:tetrafelino:tetrafelino:I’m noticing some interesting choices with regards to pronouns in Laura Pohl’s translation of All Systems Red. See, in Portuguese we don’t have object pronouns like “it/its” and neutral neopronouns like “elu/delu” are considered more analogous to the English “they/them”, so gendering Murderbot the way that it is gendered in the original was always going to be tricky. There’s also the other difficulty that adjectives are gendered in Portuguese, so whenever Murderbot describes itself or it’s emotional state or anything, necessarily it was going to gender itself grammatically in some way. What this translation does at first is that the Murderbot’s internal dialogue it genders itself in the masculine which I assumed to be just sort of defaulting Murderbot to be a masculine character, but in reflection of a different detail, I think it’s just defaulting to this formal almost archaic notion of the masculine as neutral. Now, the detail that…