Is acht non-binary? English sources prior to side order seem to use she/her, but I know that some niche band members are referred to, gender-neutrally in japanese sources
as far as we're concerned, yeah. At the very least, they are intended to be gender non-conforming even in japanese.
a correction on the band members: it's not that they're referred to gender neutrally, its that they're not referred to with any terms that clearly indicate a gender, something that is easy to do in Japanese, but very hard to do in English. in Japanese, third person pronouns(3PP) are not used anywhere nearly as much as in english, and can usually be avoided all together. This does not mean these characters are canonically non-binary, just that it's unconfirmed what they are. I have this disclaimer on all the band lore translations.
going back to Acht, this ask I answered should answer this question...mostly.
There is one addendum id like to make: Acht is only considered a bokukko in the JP fandom because of information from 2018: haikara walker calling them 彼女, she, and a dev interview referring to them as an 女の子, a girl. in side order and onwards, the japanese version has avoided referring to acht with gendered terms....aside from being a takozones, which is traditionally an all-female class of elite octolings, but acht's whole story is that their rejection of that life forced onto them...
now mind you, 3PPs arent super common in JP. but in ordertune, a 3PP pops up again to refer to acht. and it's not 彼女 kanojo, she. it's 氏 shi.
what is 氏? i more often see this word as a name suffix (like -san but more formal and mainly just used in writing rather than speech). 氏, nowadays, is gender neutral.
its usage here stands out to me because 彼女 would fit in that part of the sentence perfectly. and they didn't use it.
(you can read the translation of ordertune here)
a ""funny"" take ive seen a few times is that acht is only non binary in english because "splatoon's english localization is bad" and that acht is just a tomboy (so. still just a girl) in japanese.
1. with the above evidence, even if you count that 女の子 from 2018, a time before they were fleshed out properly as a character, acht reads as a gender nonconforming character in the source language. this intention is made clearer when looking at more recent information. if you play side order in japanese, there is not a single line of dialogue or anything referring to acht as a girl, as you'd expect for a mere 'tomboy'.
2. if you say some "splatoon is woke because the english localization is bad" shit you are talking straight out of your ass. pray tell, where did you hear the localization is "bad"? who is the only person in the splatoon community with a longstanding track record of both analyzing splatoon's localization differences and retranslating dialogue, thus making the notion of splatoon's english localization having issues in the first place, widespread. me. now sit down
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