I love Dimension 20 and all the people that work on it, but there’s something they’ve done this season (FHJY) that’s really bothered me.
When Cassandra was first introduced at the end of Sophomore Year, Brennan set the precedent of using they/them pronouns for them, and the rest of the cast followed suit (SY didn’t have the handy-dandy graphics with pronouns). However, when Cassandra was first introduced this year, their graphic only had she/her pronouns. This is despite Brennan and Ally confirming in 2020 that Cassandra is non-binary and uses she/they pronouns.
This was amended a few episodes later, the next time Cassandra’s card popped up.
However, I don’t think Brennan or any of the cast members ever used they/them pronouns when referring Cassandra this season, despite doing so in the previous season. And while using she/her pronouns for Cassandra is totally fine, ignoring their other set of pronouns feels weird. I’ve seen this happen with multi-pronoun folks in my life before where others around them default to the binary pronouns (she/her or he/him) rather than neutral pronouns (they/them or neopronouns). It feels as though they are ignoring that person’s genderqueerness and simply doing whatever comes naturally to them. In this case, Cassandra is presented as a feminine person, so since the option to use she/her pronouns is there, that’s what the cast does. (A similar thing happened to Baron in Baron’s Game and also in general. I could go on about the weird aphobia vibes in that episode…)
It’s a little strange to me since the cast is so good with pronouns for IRL folks like Ally; I would have thought that mindset extended to everyone else, but it seems not to have. Which is disappointing.
In a way, it’s funny because they’re doing what the villains are doing to Ankarna in this season: projecting human priorities such as the gender binary onto divine beings.
To clarify: I’m not saying that you can’t use binary pronouns for multi-pronoun folks as long as it’s fine with them. But only using binary pronouns when there are other options feels so limiting.