Board Thread:Internal management/@comment-5079138-20161101102405

OK, PLEASE, PLEASE, READ THE ENTIRE PAGE CAREFULLY TO PREVENT MISUNDERSTANDINGS AND WHATNOT.

Here's another pronoun change thread, and you should care about this.

After some considerations I have to make this thread. Using "it" for zombies' pronouns has several major flaws. We SHOULD change it back to "he/she" for zombies' pronouns (i.e. "he" for male zombies and "she" for female)

I'm just gonna point out in using the flaws of using "it" for zombies straight:

First reason, you can easily identify whether or not they’re male or female. Unlike plants, which usually doesn’t have any easily identifiable parts, zombies have. Zombies have some visual cues that humans have in real life, unlike plants. Just look at their, for example, hair or clothing, and you’ll be able to easily tell if they’re male or female.

Second reason, “it” sounds inappropriate if you call someone with an obvious male or female name as “it”. Like this.

“Dr. Chester is a Scientist variant in Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare. It was first revealed on…”

Or this.

“Rachel Platten is a zombie in Humans, Plants, and Zombies. It is one of the non-playable female characters in…”

Even worse, this.

"Captain Partyman is a Legendary Captain Deadbeard variant in Plants vs. Zombies: GW2. It was first revealed on..." (he's obviously a male, because "man", but calling him as "it" makes the whole thing ridiculous)

Really? Now, this is where your logic is used. Do you wanna call them “it”, which is inappropriate, or “he/she”, which is way more appropriate? Obviously you wanna use the latter option, right? Which means that gender-neutrality will be ignored. Well sure there's an exception to this (e.g. heroes in PvZH and GW series IIRC), but still, we should make EVERY zombies use "he/she" as pronoun.

The only solution to this is that we use “he/she” for them, and to prevent inconsistencies, use “he/she” for every single humanlike zombies.

Third, I'm just gonna repeat the statement above as well as intensify it. Dr. Zomboss and heroes in PvZH and some zombies in GW series are the only zombies excluded from this gender neutrality rule, while the rest isn't. This causes some discrepancies by making the rest of the zombies being called as "it".

Fourth, fundamentally, zombies are dead humans, so it's really better to use "he/she" to refer them. Also, when you refer to a dead person in real life, you still use "he/she" instead of "it", right? I mean just look at this:

"Albert Einstein was a German-American physicist. It was one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century."

Dude, it just sounds WEIRD.

Fifth, according to some people I messaged on chat, they actually prefer using "he/she" instead of "it" to refer zombies. If we stick to using gender neutrality for zombies, this means that we're forcing them to not do the thing they always wanted to do. Due to the flaws mentioned here, it's obvious that using "he/she" to refer them is proper in terms of grammar, and this is completely a fine thing to do, unlike, say, using informal contractions on articles, which is obviously bad because they weren't meant to be used in formal writing, but only for everyday speech and messaging. I myself prefer using "he/she" to refer to them.

Sixth, similarly, you can use "he/she" on animals when the gender cue is obvious. However, zombie animals will still use gender neutrality as we don't know how to tell them, as the gender cue on animals usually is hard to tell.

From a Stack Exchange answer regarding to this subject:

"Animals that are obviously male or female [...] can safely be referred to as he or she[...]"

This is related to the first reason (zombies' genders are easily determinable) because it's obvious when a zombie is male or female; you can tell by his/her appearance.

Last but not least, some wikis prefer to use "he/she" instead of "it" for humanoid things (orcs, undeads, humanlike monsters, etc.) when their genders are identifiable, or even when the name just sounds so much like a male or female. Examples are:

WoWWiki: Drek'Thar (male orc), Thrall (male orc), Sylvanas Windrunner (female undead) (or just browse to the full list of orcs in a single category and undead too for even more proof. Surprisingly, WoWWiki is a WAY bigger community than us, yet they prefer using "he/she" to refer them! Just look at their amount of pages (104K+ at the time of writing).

Resident Evil Wiki: Salazar (male Ganado/infected zombie-like human), Oven Man (male Ganado/infected zombie-like human). The only exceptions are if the monster is an animal, or if the monster is too hard to identify (e.g. doesn't have any visual cues that tell whether it's a male or female).

Undertale Wiki: Flowey (uses "he" to refer Flowey), Sans (uses "he"), Toriel (uses "she"), and many more (check the characters' articles on that wiki). The only exception is if the gender of the character is NEVER mentioned in any parts of the game. The wiki will use the character's name instead of using "he/she/it".

The Impossible Quiz Wiki: Chris (cat, referred as "he" due to its name)

Pixar Wiki: Mike Wazowski (one of the monster protagonists in Monsters Inc. and Monsters Univ, referred as "he"),  Chet Alexander (an antagonist monster in Monsters Univ, referred as "he" too),  Dean Hardscrabble (another monster in Monsters Univ, referred as "she")

Now, this is only for zombies. Plants should stick with gender neutrality as there are some discrepancies PopCap made like calling the Dandelion as “he” in the almanac but “she” in the ads. Also, some of the peashooters are female and the Rose Swordsman is a male, and there’s no obvious visual cue to tell whether they’re male or female unlike zombies, so the usage for plants is a bit in a gray area. It's quite a discrepancy for plants, but until PopCap gives us gender clarification on all plants it's simply not possible yet (they usually don't really have identifiable gender-related parts).

If you're telling me this is too late because a lot of pages have turned back into using "it", well, nothing's too late.

I’m the most responsible person for this, as I did some pronoun fixes on a lot of zombies pages back then, when the pronoun usage for them was inconsistent (still using “it” to refer zombies, despite the new “he/she” rule). If this wins, I’ll try to fix every single pages that use “it” to refer zombies just like what I did back then, for your pleasure and consistency of course, so sit back and relax while I try to fix those :P (or you can just help me fix them to make things easier :P)

'Also, choose wisely. Do you want me to go back in wiki action by making me change the pronouns of every single zombies, as well as to recover my wiki activity, or just leave me here sitting down on chat doing nothing useful but talking to others, and risk me to be demoted due to low rate of mainspace activity? It's up to you.'

or

 