The hero is male? Excuse me? In the HotU .tlk files, all mentions of the Hero of Neverwinter in reference to HotU are clearly states as <he/she>. Unless there is some interview I am unaware of, there is no canon gender for the Hero of Neverwinter. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.232.25.233 (talk • contribs)
The only third-person singular gender-neutral pronoun in the English language is "it", and most writers don't like to refer to people as "it". One of the most common solutions to this is allowing "he" to refer to people of unknown gender and doing so was taught widely in schools for hundreds of years. It's only recently that people have started considering this prejudiced, the last few decades or so.
"(S)he" is often considered an inelegant solution to the problem (many writers hate using it for anything but technical writing), and using alternating gender pronouns may cause confusion among readers in such a short article. This leaves the options of:
- Using a singular "they", which some people still consider an incorrect usage.
- Referring to somebody as "one" all the time, which can get irritating.
- Making up a new word and hoping it catches on (which has never worked in this case).
People have been trying to fix this gap in the language for hundreds of years, and it's mostly just an issue of writing style now, whatever seems to work best in the piece. Nobody means anything by it. Tharchion 05:59, May 16, 2012 (UTC)
Canon romance?[]
"However the game Hordes of the Underdark implies the characters sex as male, because of the romance between him and Aribeth."
Where exactly it is established as canon? Aribeth's HOTU dialogue?