A Critical Role pronoun discovery
There's another Campaign 2 character who has she/they pronouns. I don't mean Dairon. I don't mean Jourrael. I mean Shelda Delles. Unless you're deep in Mighty Nein lore, you might not remember this half-elf at all, who was on the Balleater crew. Until today, their article on the Critical Role Wiki only used she/her pronouns.
The way I came about this discovery was somewhat peculiar. I'm in the middle of a project at Encyclopedia Exandria using Python to automatically detect transcript plagiarism in articles and tag them as {{copied}}, so we can, y'know, not plagiarize. (The problematic content pretty much entirely originates from Fandom.) My Python program compares the sentences for each article to the related transcripts, and returns similar sentence pairs as wiki tables so I can evaluate whether the {{copied}} tag is warranted. So… this came up.
I searched their name on the interactive CR transcript site and Matt's pronoun usage was very deliberate. Two other quotes from the same episode: "Shelda is her name." and "So Shelda is just up there, but they used their action to get up there, so that's their turn."
Now, I watched this episode and I completely did not notice that Matt used both she and they pronouns for Shelda. It is easy to miss in the context of all the action. But to take the trouble of copying all the text but removing "themself", and of course, never using they/them anywhere else in the article? That is erasure, plain and simple. This is a case where the editor who copies text wholesale actually knows this better than the one who doesn't. As a they/them person myself, this is not some thought exercise. This mirrors what I have to deal with in my everyday life. It hurts.
But of course, what's great about wikis is that you can edit them! Peep Shelda's new infobox:
Thanks to my fellow @encyclopediacr editors who work hard to ensure that all LGBTQIA+ identities, for characters and irl humans, are properly represented and affirmed.
