Awww, thank you for being here so long!  And for reading the rewrite after having been a fan of the first one, I’m always so glad when people give it a fighting chance against their nostalgia.

I was curious regarding pronouns

Aren’t we all, though

There is Some Shit here, so I’m just gonna unpack, ja?  You’ve been around long enough that you’ve sat through me doing a shit load of words, so I’m gonna bank on you being cool with that here as well.   I could give you a short answer, but what fun is that?  It doesn’t waste time, and it doesn’t give me the illusion of interacting with people I don’t work with, so that’s bullshit and we aren’t doing it.

Johnny’s gender nonsense may have happened because of my own, and just like the asexuality, there was kind of a delay in me picking up that I might have been using him as a good place for me try things on and see how other people react to them before risking putting them on myself.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t just sit there and force it; I genuinely think he’s displaying all this stuff in some way and it just happened to be stuff that was applicable to me too, but it was kind of convenient and the more there is, the more people are Not Great about it.  

I even bother saying this because we share a lot of things - many coincidental or subconscious and I’m a little self conscious about them - and one of them is the pronoun conundrum.  I thought about pronouns for him A Lot when I started the rewrite.  I’d been saying the Homicides were two girls, two guys, and Johnny since like 2008, but didn’t know that was a real thing that could Be, as much as the idea appealed to me.  Before I caught it and changed it back, there was even a single line in reSWAN on AO3 that referred to Johnny as ‘they,’ and I don’t remember consciously choosing to call him that, but there it was anyhow and I was really surprised by it.  I changed that one instance back to ‘he,’ but I was thinking about gender things with him perhaps even more after that.  While I rolled around what I was going to do, I was struck with a lot of factors both in and out of the story itself.  

I mentioned to several people at some point while writing this that I thought Johnny would really like pronouns with x’s or z’s in them if he knew they existed, just because I thought he’d enjoy the kind of vibe those letters have, and that was the first weird block.  I thought I might like to use a non-standard pronoun set for him, but I didn’t know if I could manufacture a way for him to have found out about them and not have us just take a trip to info dump town in the middle of the story.  I almost did it all at the same time as the asexual thing, but I thought he’d have corrected it earlier if it had been a big deal, so I let it go as a thing he didn’t know about yet.  I thought I might want him to be able to later, though, so I set up some ways for him to find out in the future and some precedent for him having decided on another set before, because I really liked the idea that he’d be able to use some that were his own if I could get them to cross paths.  

The problem was that the ones I joked that he would like, with x’s or z’s, turned out to be the ones I liked for myself, too, and then I felt really Self Insert LOL, about it.  I thought I could maybe just go with ‘they’ like I’d accidentally done once, but I worried it would get confusing since the Homicides do things as a group so often.  Considering what a mess this thing turns into, I was concerned about clarity of actions of Johnny as contrasted with actions of the group sporting the same pronoun, but then argued with myself that he spends so much time with Edgar while sharing pronouns with him and we seem to do okay there.    

So now I’m here worried about clarity with ‘they,’ and I worried ‘xe’ would be too distracting or implausible for him to have run across in universe along with a bit too ‘same as author’, and THEN, because I’m never done worrying, I worried that not letting him use he would be implying that you couldn’t use he or she with a nonbinary identity and that you are immediately obligated to use ‘they’ or something else when you come to that place.  I tried to have Johnny explain to Edgar that he could use he or she or whatever he wanted and still be nonbinary, no matter how he presented, but there’s still more to do with it, you know?   He found out about that term second hand and decided that was good without much further consideration, but maybe with ISH and seeing himself referred to incorrectly from people outside the Homicides could spark him to look into it further.  He’s not haunted by ‘he’ feeling particularly bad to him, but he mentions using it just because it’s the most neutral thing he’s come across, so maybe changing it later would make the most sense for his wanting ‘nothing’ as a pronoun.  He feels comfortable and secure that he’s understood inside his group, but the outside world needs more guidance to view him the way he wants to be, and a pronoun shift could help. 

It’s unfortunate that I feel like Johnny has to hold the entire representation mantle himself, which is making it a little complicated.  I think if there were more nonbinary people (or more asexual people, while we’re at it) in media, I wouldn’t be so worried about how much weight he’s personally pulling, because there would be other examples readily available to tell you that he’s a variation on a theme, not The Template.  Johnny is like several very special episodes of fucked up Sesame Street rolled into one person.

So he could use they, and he could xe, and he could use she if he really wanted. I could even write him to be okay with several, but then that becomes hard to write also as far as consistency or clarity?  Like how hard do we stress that either this or that is fine without it becoming a soup of ‘who did what now?’ in practice?  And then, given that, maybe he views himself with different pronouns than Edgar (the other likely POV character)??  They could probably have a chat about it.  There is already a sketchy version of a conversation with Edgar correcting people about the gender issue in general in the new ISH, so.  

I was not expecting to have as much turmoil sorting out a fictional person’s pronouns as my own, and yet here we are.  

Thanks for asking about this! Despite the preceding word vomit, I feel like I got a little clearer about what I want to do with it.   I’m up for hearing feelings on it if it interests other people, too!