Talk:Meena
Meena's Gender
The page currently lists Meena's gender as "Female". As far as I know, the script never directly mentions Meena's gender, but the English localisation uses she/her pronouns, and they speak in a feminine voice. Normally I'd accept this as enough evidence to list their gender as "Female". However, as this page mentions, Meena apparently uses masculine pronouns in the Chinese translations, which leads me to question whether or not she actually is female. Additionally, I believe Meena uses the masculine first-person pronoun "boku" in the original Japanese script. I understand Japanese pronouns aren't necessarily gendered and there are many girls that use "boku", including Arle Nadja herself. I don't claim to be an expert in Japanese, my knowledge of the language is very, very limited. However, given the previous things I mentioned, I feel like this just adds to the uncertainty of Meena's gender. As such, I feel like we shouldn't list Meena's gender, until we receive further confirmation. FizzyChalice (talk) 02:17, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
- I also noticed this during the game's release. Your reading of her personal identifier in Japanese (boku) is correct. While it doesn't necessarily mean that she isn't a girl, the lack of gendering in the original Japanese script also made me unsure of what to refer to her as until I saw the English script. For the time being, I'll remove her gender until we have more information, but I think we should go forward with she/her/hers pronouns for the sake of consistency, readability, and to be consistent with the English release... If you have any information about how she is gendered in other languages at all, I would appreciate the information. --✦ Eudaemonics | Admin (page / talk) 03:31, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
- There is something I would like to clarify about the Chinese pronouns part. The specific pronoun used here is '他'. First, the masculinity of this pronoun probably only applies to Simplified Chinese, as this word is used in the Traditional Chinese l10n to refer to even known female characters like Amitie, so this pronoun is almost definitely gender-neutral in TC. Hence, simply saying that 'the Chinese translations do it this way' is probably inaccurate; this is specific to Simplified Chinese. Second, despite the commonly recognized masculinity in the word in SC, this word still contains a meaning as a gender-neutral pronoun although using the word for this specific meaning is much less common in real life now. But still, of course, there isn't assuming Meena as female in any way here. Nphuracm (talk) 16:21, 19 April 2024 (UTC)
