#frenchposting?

[likeahammr]

Lestat poisson d’avril

[aseriesofunfortunatejan]

Since I have a history of checking if the French and German versions use different pronouns from the other translations for some reason, now that every version of the RAIN CODE official site is up to date, I get to do it again. (Yes this was a real thing with World's End Club's demo version, which misgendered Reycho in French and German.)

I'm of course talking about possible-nonbinary-sovereign Halara Nightmare. I'm in the process of bullying an adorable girl into telling me what the Spanish profile uses, but she's asleep, so.

Halara's French profile:

"Halara Nightmare Fait partie des Maîtres Détectives envoyés à Kanai Ward. Son aptitude criminalistique est la rétrocognition. Halara garde toujours son sang-froid et a résolu de nombreuses affaires complexes grâce à son esprit de déduction. Halara ne croit qu’en l’argent et n’accepte jamais une requête qui n’est pas payée, et ce, peu importe le client. Aptitude criminalistique : rétrocognition Elle permet de visualiser la scène de crime telle qu’au moment où la première personne arrivée sur place l'a découverte."

Things to note: - the way this is written is incredibly ugly. Hire an ex-languages and literature student, I'm out of a job at the moment. Please. - in French, "son" or "sa" does not pertain to the gender of the person. As such "son" in the second sentence gives no indication what their gender is. - just like every other translation, it defaults to name over pronoun, even though every other profile uses gendered pronouns. - I also like to clown on American English for using too many capital letters in titles but I think rétrocognition deserved one. - the description of their Forensic Forte uses "elle", which again, doesn't pertain to their gender. It pertains to "aptitude" (English "Forte"), which is a feminine word.

Unfortunately, the latter is a very awkward, ugly and confusing way to go about it, which will no doubt convince some French readers that Halara uses elle ("she"). But in the translators' defence, Aphex Logan's profile also uses that, where it's obvious it's not referring to him.

Image description: Aphex Logan's Forensic Forte's description in French. The description starts with the French feminine pronoun "elle".

I'm not going to torture you with the German description too, because as much as I can read it, I couldn't critique it in an interesting way. But from what I can see, it doesn't use gendered pronouns either. (I'd have to check it out again, but I recall that inclusive language in German is very awkward and difficult, so I wonder what will be used for Halara in-game.)

(Similarly, I have my doubts about inclusive French language being used in-game, since it's been repeatedly rejected by the old fucks at l'Académie Française, even with attempts to make it evolve a bit. Still, some advertisers and companies use it, so it's not that uncommon.)

Edit: by the way "aptitude criminalistique" kind of makes it sound like an ability that helps them commit crimes, not investigate them. What's this, Akudama Drive all of a sudden?

Edit2: spanish cute says the spanish description is also neutral. no pronouns no siree :)