xea

and grace is trying so hard to not accidentally be sexist or assign gender roles to a monogendered species, so like, trying hard not to call someone he/him just because they like sports, or she/her just because they seem caring, or whatever. and he's having a hard time about it because he's like oh man why am I assigning the pronouns I'm assigning, i hope I'm not bringing any of my biases into this. just absolutely eating himself up over it

he tries to fix this by starting to roll a die, or throw darts at a dartboard, but his students immediately throw a fit because the point of the word-gifts is that they are specific, picked deliberately for them, right? and grace tries to explain gender bias and so on, but it becomes clear these kids could genuinely not give less of a shit, they just want to know what their AGAG (assigned gender at grace) is, alright? why is this so hard for him to understand??

eventually grace comes to the conclusion that he's on a different planet, and severely overthinking this, and that his kids really just are having fun--they really don't see the grace-given pronouns as categorization, he figures they see them as something more akin to astrology. or an eridian tiktok trend. when grace learns they call the assigning a word-gift he probably cries tbh

"teacher grace!!! what my pronoun question???"

"hmm. getting big they/them vibes off you"

They send someone to stop the experiment but Grace refuses cause they’re so far in already and well that would just ruin the data.

Oh, I totally agree! I have always thought "....I wasn't talking to you!" when the partner says something, and a suspect responds by addressing up by name.

I know the player does sometimes talk (but we don't hear them), due to how partners will say something like, "Okay, you don't need to yell at me!" (seem to remember this in Pacific Bay with Frank), or characters saying, "You don't need to tell me twice" or "What, you think we should do/talk to X" or "I agree, let's do X," which implies the character is saying something but we don't see it. I guess it's all for the sake of being able to create your own protagonist/self-insert.

There is a tiny bit of characterization, though, with the fact that iirc, dialogue in s1 seemed to imply that the player was joking around a bit more, like with it seeming to imply, for example, that the player was teasing Jones about the old lady from Beautiful No More (forgot her name) seeming to have an interest in him, but after King's suicide/the Crimson Order in general, the player got more impatient with the other characters. I can imagine seeing so many people they cared about get murdered, be murderers, and/or betray them, the player's mental health had severely deteriorated by s8. I can imagine them having no patience for the characters in s8 and their cavalier attitudes, since it doesn't seem like Paris was ever affected by any of the world-ending stuff the player had to stop!

Heck, the player was probably not in a good mental state by the end of s5. Three friends dead, four if you include Zoe, upwards of thousands of people in Grimsborough killed within a year or so because of Rozetta's earthquake and Denise/Otto's neohuman rampage, and I can't begin to imagine the guilt the player would've felt about Mia's death, considering you were the target of that. They would've been overwhelmed with guilt and anguish, and I wouldn't blame them at all for refusing to accept Warren's apology at the end of Blaze of Glory. Honestly, the player has more control than me, the second I saw Warren at the start of Airport, I would've been screaming and swearing at him, and probably would have to be stopped from hitting him lol. But I actually do like that Warren puts a hit on specifically you, and that in Mysteries of the Past, Eleanor Halstead specifically says that she was planning on killing YOU, because it connects the player with the world much, much better, since a lot of times, it seems like the player is sort of just drifting on the outskirts of everything, watching and getting addressed, but never talking to anyone or being affected by the plot.

Wow, holy tangent. Sorry about that! But thank you for the ask!