What gender is your Gallade character Spoon?
Sorry if I’m answering this ridiculously late! I’m really bad at checking my inbox and message notifications don’t always seem to show up for me, so I’m not sure when this came in.
The answer to this is actually more complicated than it should be.
Spoon doesn’t have a strong sense of gender identity and is honestly pretty confused and uncomfortable about the whole thing.
Part of that comes from the fact that they were raised by a clan of Bronzong that didn’t really have gender as a concept in their society.
I wouldn’t go as far as to call them a hive mind or anything, but their society was very strongly focused on the collective over the individual, and strove to be “in-sync” with the Clan through their psychic resonance.
The Bronzong language is made up of various energy waves, which ranges from long, bell-like notes to psychic “Extrasensory” waves that would be incredibly difficult to interpret by non-psychics outside of giving them a massive headache. They have no equivalent of a “singular” first-person or third-person pronoun, as they refer to both the individual and the piece of the greater whole they carry with them.
Spoon likes being addressed with they/them/their pronouns because it’s the closest equivalent of the way of referring to them used in the Bronzong language. Spoon also often uses “we” when speaking in first person. They try to adjust and use “I” sometimes, but have difficulty with it.
Spoon gets addressed with “he” a lot because of their species, which they’re kind of “meh” about. Not to the extent where it actively upsets them, and they kind of understood going into evolution that it would happen - it’s just kind of weird to them. They feel similar about she/her on the rare occasion they are addressed that way.
Blu, incidentally, has taken to using “I” for themself without issue, and doesn’t particularly care about whatever pronouns or gendered terms are used to refer to them. I mostly use “they” as well, but I think Blu would think it’s pretty neat when people call them he or she or anything else, because they’re just kind of fascinated by the whole thing.
I do think Spoon would wind up falling somewhere in the non-binary range even if they were raised in a gendered society - I don’t want it to come across like the only reason they’re nonbinary is because they were raised by Bronzong - but in this case their upbringing has influenced a lot of the way they see themselves so I felt the need to explain it in context.
(I know I’ve had Spoon use singular language or he/him pronouns in previous posts/comics/drawings, it’s admittedly something I’ve kind of retconned as I’ve thought more about Spoon and Blu’s identities as characters, their different relationships to the Bronzong clan and how they would have grown up.)
Thanks for asking!