squidward tentacles
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2021
Something similar happened in a fantasy novel I was reading. It was pretty mediocre to begin with, but then the author had a they/them. After that, it was pretty much impossible to tell if there were multiple characters in a scene, or if it was the they/them. I ended up dropping it not long after that.There's an author I like to follow. He writes a lot, has published daily for years, and has enough of a dedicated following that he makes some decent money off of it. He is a competent and experienced writer and I think he knows what he's doing.
In the middle of an otherwise normal story he introduced a "nonbinary" character. That would have been fine- it was genuinely sexless in a way that made perfect narrative sense. This was not directly described, but it was incredibly obvious what the author had done within about a paragraph, and the prose was noticeably awkward every single time the character appeared for the rest of the story.
English is pretty flexible, but that was the end of any doubt I had.
I know older sci-fi would often refer to robots/aliens/other non humans as 'it', and that was so much more readable. Unfortunately, sci/fantasy seems to be a hotbed for begendered writers.