You mentioned in tags some cultures have genders that don't align to the masc/fem - can you tell us more about that, and if any of our characters use these system(s)?
The non-standard gender systems I have for the Redux, sadly, won’t get a ton of limelight apart from the occasional off-hand mention. Not because I don’t want to include them, but because I wasn’t sure how to include them in a way that wouldn’t be off-putting to readers. Old Vale’s gender system is probably the most…unconventional of the lot.
None of the main cast (or any minor characters) at the moment use the more unusual gender systems I’ve come up with. They’re all presented as either male, female, nonbinary, bigender, genderfluid, or genderqueer, as we would understand those terms.
That aside, I’m still happy to give an overview of each kingdom’s take on gender.
Atlas’ is probably the most bog standard—it has a masculine/feminine binary, derived from the system used by Old Mantic settlers (who were descended from the Matsu people of Northern Anima). That being said, Atlas arguably has the most extreme adherence to gender performativity, given that the country tends to skew more conservative. Behavior, appearance, speech, and the like are strongly dictated by cisheteronormative expectations, particularly amongst Atlas’ upper class. As a result, the people of Solitas (which include Atlesians, Mantese, and Evadnine) generally have disproportionately exaggerated expressions of gender when compared to other countries. It’s something that I plan to explore more in-depth with characters like Weiss, Willow, May, and Watts as the story progresses, seeing as they all have very strong opinions regarding their culture’s value system.
Mistral’s gender system is a binary as well, but it has two “models,” so to speak. But before we go any further, I need to quickly clarify something:
Social gender is an identity ascribed to people, usually packaged with corollary traits.
Grammatical gender (sometimes used interchangeably with noun class) is a division of linguistics that categorizes nouns in relation to other aspects of language, such as adjectives, articles, or verbs.
Sometimes there’s correlation between the two, and sometimes there isn’t. In Spanish, for example, el hombre (man) is a masculine noun. The grammatical gender reinforces the culturally-associated semantic one. However, la hombrĂa (manliness) is a grammatically feminine word, despite being a concept tied to masculinity.
It’s not surprising, then, that grammatical gender and social gender get conflated from time to time.
As for how this relates to the Redux—at one point Mistral had a social gender binary that was culturally synonymized with its grammatical gender. And the nouns of Old Mistrali-Mantic (the protolanguage of the Animoigne language family) weren’t categorized by masculinity or femininity. Instead, its nouns were divided into categories based on animacy (to what extent something is considered sentient/alive).
This means that, effectively, Mistral’s people were at one point monogender (that gender being geyl, “alive”). Distinctions like “masculine” and “feminine” didn’t really exist, outside of borrowing those concepts from other cultures. Old Mistrali-Mantic had words for things like “person who gestates” and “person who sires,” but those terms had no actual bearing on a person’s identity, or how they expressed themselves. They exclusively referred to biological sex, not gender. (And yes, animacy extended to pronouns, too. Old Mistrali-Mantic had four third-person pronouns, two singular and two plural. Imagine if English had two versions of it and they, and they were used to communicate whether or not the subject was alive. That’s basically the gist of it.)
Over time, however, as the Kingdom of Mistral conquered its neighbors across Anima, it began to assimilate them. This cultural exchange was a two-way street, though, and some of the nations that it annexed did in fact have masculine and feminine genders. As the Mistrali Empire grew, masculine and feminine genders caught on, and gradually supplanted the older non-grammatical animacy genders.
Animacy is preserved in several of the daughter languages in the Animoigne language family, as noun classes. But people in Mistral no longer identify as geyl. Nowadays, the default is either male, female, or (rarely) nonbinary. *
In the modern day, Mistral sees masculinity and femininity as a spectrum, with nonbinary being closer to androgyny. Something like this:
Vacuo, on the other hand, sees gender more like this:
And even then, the way that Vacuo deals with “conventional” gender (masc/fem) is odd, too.
See, in Western society, when we talk about people being nonbinary, we typically mean that their gender falls outside of a binary—masculinity and femininity.
In Vacuo, masculinity and femininity exist as part of a ternary system, with a third distinct gender that has no point of easy comparison to anything in our world. (I’ve been calling it “neutral” for lack of a better word, but really, it doesn’t quite work. “Neutral” implies having no strongly marked characteristics or features, and calling Vacuo’s third gender neutral would be like calling masculinity neutral. Because it absolutely does have its own unique qualities and associated traits. Alas, “neutral” will have to do for now.)
Someone who identifies with a gender outside of those three would be considered nonternary (as opposed to nonbinary, which would be the not-quite equivalent). Thus, Vacuo technically recognizes four categories of gender—masculine, feminine, “neutral,” and any gender that isn’t part of its traditional three.
Vacuo’s also a lot more culturally accepting/permissive of genders from other nations, and it doesn’t begrudge how people identify or express themselves. Vacuites are a relatively chill bunch.
And last but not least, Vale. The kingdom whose gender system started this entire discussion, and by far is the weirdest of the four.
Similar to Mistral of antiquity, Old Vale didn’t recognize male or female. Its genders—of which there were eight—were tied to a different culturally-valuable element: the seasons.
And for every one of Vale’s eight genders, there was a corresponding season that matched.
Eastern Sanus experiences four yearly divisions, reckoned by solar, astronomical, and meteorological phenomena. These are winter, spring, summer, and autumn, known in Old Vale as the “material seasons.” The material seasons have fixed calendar dates.
The other four are classified as the “liminal seasons,” or maidentides. Unlike the material seasons, maidentides don’t have fixed calendar dates. A maidentide could be more concisely described as the ephemeral, transient blurring of two seasons—when the temporal boundary that separates them is vague, evidenced by qualities of both the retreating season and the oncoming one superimposed upon each other. The summer-autumn maidentide, for example, is characterized by days where the oppressive humidity and heat of summer cling to the air, even as the foliage turns shades of brown, red, and yellow, and the leaves begin to fall.
In Old Vale, it was customary for a child’s first gender to be assigned to them based on the season they were born in. The genders paralleled the transient nature of the seasons by allowing people to freely transition between them, just as the world shifts between seasons. A person’s gender didn’t have to match the season they were currently in, either—as in, a person with a spring gender wouldn’t be expected to change it to a summer gender as May turned to June.
Interestingly, Old Valin cultures wouldn’t have recognized being cisgender or transgender, because gender transition is the default for their model. They did, however, have something sort of analogous.
Rather than there being cis- or transgender individuals, you had what were known as static and fluid individuals. Fluid individuals were those whose gender identity wasn’t rooted in a single season, and could freely move between them as wanted or needed. A static-gender person, by contrast, was someone whose gender was immutable and “locked in” to a single season, and who was relatively confident that the season they identified with was the only one that could fit them best.
The season genders of Old Vale originated in the mountain range of eastern Sanus, the Cirithel Mountains. In the present day, they’re more or less exclusively confined to that area. When some of the population split off centuries ago and migrated toward the western coast, they ended up ditching their gender system in favor of one similar to Vacuo’s. Unless you’re travelling to the city of Gyden, then you’re unlikely to encounter someone who identifies as one of the season genders. It’s estimated that those culturally-endemic genders will disappear within the next century or so.
Obviously, in a world as culturally diverse as Remnant’s, there would be multiple gender systems besides the ones I talked about. But truthfully, I haven’t had the time to develop any others beyond the aforementioned four. Hopefully what I wrote managed to answer your questions!
* There’s one exception to the animacy pronouns, and it’s not a particularly nice one. When Mistrali racists want to dehumanize Faunus, they’ll refer to them using the inanimate pronoun siþ. The animate pronoun geyl is used for people, so when someone uses siþ, they’re basically stripping a Faunus of their personhood by reducing them to the status of something non-living.
Addressing a Faunus as siþ would be like calling them an “it.”
