I realize that this story is a bit old now, that general forum conversation has moved on, and that no one is interested in my newbie nobody opinion. I don't care. I was so excited to look at the forums after I heard Sounding the Fall. I was thrilled when I noticed that it had a large number of comments shortly after its release, which is not always common. I was completely surprised, and very disquieted, by the fact that almost every comment had something negative to say about the gender neutral pronouns, several saying they didn't finish the story or seeming to completely misunderstand it as a result of their distaste for those pronouns.
When I made my first comment on this thread, I was thinking about the author. I was horrified at the thought that Jei D. Marcade might read through the comments that were so dismissive of the work, that didn't even finish the story, that wondered why someone would bother with gender neutral pronouns. I was thinking about the crippling self-doubt that sometimes comes with being different, and how crushing it can be when a supposedly open-minded niche community confirms all the biases of society at large. I couldn't let this story get lambasted without a champion.
Sounding the Fall is a philosophical work about religion. It's about devotion in a world of perpetual (and necessary?) materialism. It's a meditation on how deeply humanity's relationship with technology might affect our minds and identities. It's a little disjointed, but it's one of those stories that feels like it should engender a novel because it is already saying so much in such a little space, because the ideas it plays with are big enough to be explored on a much larger scale.
Those forumites who protested the pronouns, and then came right on back to stand up for their right to protest the pronouns, fail to realize that they are saying nothing. This story is not about pronouns. The pronouns are legitimately not any harder to parse than the fabulous fictional world in which they appear and they should be treated as such by any reader who doesn't have something to protest about gender neutral pronouns in general.
Not only that, but anyone who deals with gender neutral pronouns is constantly told not to use them, that they're confusing or jarring. But a creative community should be able to say more.
I'm not saying you're a bigot if you struggled with it. I'm not saying that at all. Most humans have their understanding of the world around them forcibly gendered from a very young age. Colors, recreational activities, verbal expressions and shoes are just a few examples of genderless things that people tend to gender based on what's been communicated to them. Understanding the world in male/female categories is a huge part of growing up and going through life, but the truth is that most of the time those categories are imposed, not inherent.
The idea of a person without gender is painful blow to a gendered understanding of the world. For everyone. I get that. My point with all of my comments is that if you felt strongly affected by the use of genderless pronouns, so strongly affected, for example, that you felt wounded to hear Nathan dismiss your concerns, than you have work to do on your understanding of gender and your acceptance of nonbinary identities. And you have a beautiful, if challenging, story to help you do that work.
So this?
Sentences like " Come on. Acknowledge your prejudices and get over them for the love of fiction. That's what it's about." are personally offensive, disrespectful, and as I pointed out, downright wrong. So please take such comments elsewhere.
I reject that absolutely. The sentences you quoted are my way of saying that fiction has no need to attend to the comforts of a society that lies about what gender is, what is gendered, and how gender must be displayed; and more importantly, that readers can choose see beyond those lies through the power of fiction, if they are willing to do the work of moving past the prejudices that have been instilled in them since they were old enough to comprehend body language.
I can see that I was overly abrupt before. However, my comments are not a personal attack on anyone and I will not take them elsewhere. They are relevant here.