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[aphrodite_mine]

General question/comment post for RW 2015.

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[aphrodite_mine]

I apologize for the inaccuracy! Do you have a suggested change?

[aiffe]

I'm not anon and I haven't watched Tiger & Bunny yet, nor am I a fluent Japanese speaker, but my understanding of the language is that there's less of a focus on third person pronouns (she/he/they/ze/etc) because while Japanese has words kiiinda like this they're hardly ever used like they are in English and gender-neutral variants or simply using the person's name are much more common, but rather gender is more usually expressed through first person pronouns, which unlike in English are gendered. Like one example is the character Nuriko in Fushigi Yuugi, who very unfortunately is given male pronouns in the subtitles I've seen (people refer to her as "he" even if that wasn't in the Japanese) but her first-person pronoun that she uses for herself is "atashi," which is feminine.

My understanding of Japanese first-person pronouns goes somewhat like this:

Watashi - gender-neutral, formal, does not imply a desire to not be gendered by itself.
Atashi - informal, feminine, use by male-identified people is very rare.
Boku - informal, masculine, occasionally used by female-identified people (bokukko or "boku-girls") but seen as tomboyish, possibly more common in anime than in real life. Utena is one example of a femme-presenting character who uses "boku."
Ore - masculine, somewhat rude/aggressive. Use by female-identified people is very rare.
Atai - feminine, stigmatized, associated with low education and sex work, I almost never hear this one even from women. Used instead of "atashi" in some dialects.

There's a lot more ways to refer to the self in Japanese, some archaic/mostly only seen in old poetry or among royalty, and it's also more acceptable to simply say one's own name, though this can be seen as humble/cutesy--more or less the opposite of how arrogant it would sound in English.

There's other subtle ways a character can have gender expressed linguistically in Japanese. Honorifics can have gender implications, though not as strong as he/she/etc in English. Even the word used for "you" can imply gendery things, as well as power imbalances, and those power imbalances themselves can be gendery.

So while I'm not familiar with the character, I think this stuff is more relevant to Japanese-language discussions of gender--though it's not impossible for a very camp gay cis male to use "atashi," it's almost on the same level as a cis male drag queen using the pronoun "she." I don't know what this character uses, but I thought this might be useful in discussions of Japanese-speaking characters' gender presentation. Corrections welcome from people whose understanding goes deeper than "watched some anime and read some books."

[aphrodite_mine]

This is helpful! Thank you.