Reminder for those who might not know, people who tend to use masculine pronouns for V1 instead of anything else do it because masculinity is implied to be the neutral/genderless with femininity deemed as the irregular within a lot of languages as well as within the cultural frameworks we live in, especially videogames (and in particular fps’).
Within certain languages to refer to a genderless being they will be referred with a masculine pronoun until a gender is given to them, else they will be continually referred to as masculine. Neutral pronouns aren’t always an option, especially when they’re actually neopronouns within the language itself. If you want an example from another game, Shamura from Cult of the Lamb is referred to with masculine pronouns in the romance languages because the gender neutral pronouns are still very new and current institutions are very against the idea of changing their languages in fear of "losing its authenticity" (basically a bunch of racist bullshit that goes against natural linguistic evolution and wants to keep languages closer to their archaic forms. Racist because often it’ll be against adopting expressions coming from non-white backgrounds, for example arabic expressions and neologisms in french, so on.) Shamura themself if non binary, just like Lamb. It would be very likely that Lamb would as well be referred to with masculine pronouns for that same sake of "neutrality".
As for cultural frameworks, remember that since at least the 80s all until very recently videogames had been aimed at men and boys and not anyone else, which of course lead most videogame characters to be men/male adjacent in some kind of way, and that is amplified within the subgenre of fps games, as they often stand as pretty much the defining genre for so called masculinity in videogames. See the overbearing masculinity, misogyny and borderline homophobia of videogame ads in the 80s to 2010s even (like that one "you like men" ad for Duke Nukem 3D). Due to this need to have the male playerbase identify with the game and character, the playing characters were often masculine/male adjacent. So that becomes the neutral for most games. So the moment you introduce a blue, mute, armed character of course the audience is going to think "thats a robot dude" instead thinking V1 has ni gender as a machine. That’s what years of conditioning has done to us. Blue robot must mean it’s a boy.
And no matter how much Hakita says machines have no genders or how many times we draw V1 in feminine clothing people will always think of V1 as masculine because of that. The argument is, there already is a feminine version of V1 in Mirage, so Mirage must be a genderbent V1 and not her own separate character, with V1 being once again necessarily a male. Hell, even Mirage doesn’t technically have a gender, she only identifies as a girl because it’s what’s easiest for the narrative to have her as, similarly to Gabriel’s use of masculine pronouns while being himself genderless. Look at how they’re treated in nsfw art. Mirage being transfem/having a dick? No, that has to be V1. V1 with a pussy? No, that has to be Mirage. You can’t even draw V1 with a dress or Mirage undressed without people confusing the one with the other, even when tags are present.
Don’t even add V2 to the conversation, or even mention how max0r decided for a lot of people that V1 and V2 are both male AND siblings and how people start screaming when people want to refer to V2 with feminine pronouns, because it’s just more of the same stuff. Even NB themselves referring to V1 with male pronouns doesn’t help because people can’t/don’t want to dissociate pronouns and gender identity. Once again, look at Gabriel being genderless yet people still calling him a "cis heterosexual male" despite. Well. Everything. Even the promo art pushes his genderlessness but no, i guess not, i guess he’s just a femboy or whatever.
Because of this linguistic and cultural bias towards masculinity as neutral, people struggle to see V1 as anything but male. It’s something we gotta take into account and try to fight actively, because it’s not going away anytime soon. The general playerbase for fps’ is male, and they want their masculinity affirmed, so of course V1 will be a male, to go along with it. If you’ve heard the negative comments for Don’t Stop Girlypop, you’ll understand what i mean. Maleness is neutral, femininity is "cringe", "weird" or even "political". There is no real neutral because it had been assimilated into Maleness. That’s just something we gotta fight in our own ways.
Neither V1, V2 nor Gabriel have genders. V1 and V2 use whatever pronouns. Remember that going forward, please.
