Plurk paste

1) aitsu is gender neutral, full stop. it is literally used to refer to women all the time. a thesis or a REWORKING OF AN ENTIRE GAME'S SCRIPT just to make aitsu more ambiguous or translated as male-gender pronouns is just blatant misinformation, and an incorrect translation

2) i'm bringing this up because the romhack i saw doing this to chain of memories pulled out a pretty key cutscene to showcase the change; there's a scene where you enter twilight town and sora pulls out namine's good luck charm and he explains teh story of how she gave it to her after he promised to protect her from meteor showers. etc. etc.

the romhack changed sora's final line in this scene from "i really let her down" to "i have to apologize to [them]" or "i have to apologize to [him]" claiming that aitsu is too masc to have possibly mean sora was saying "i'll have to appologize to [her]"

i will give the creator of the romhack this: sora is in fact saying "i'll have to apologize to [aitsu]" - though i would not say that localizing that as "i really let her down :(" is incorrect. it's the same meaning conveyed with slightly different words. if the romhack simply changed sora's line to "i'll have to apologize to [her]", i wouldn't be here making this post

but no. the romhack insists that aitsu is a "gender-neutral but MASC LEANING pronoun" which is not true. it's gender-neutral, fullstop.

i vaguely recall calling aitsu "masc-leaning" in the past, which is part of why this is haunting me, because I WAS WRONG. i've since consulted with friends more fluent in japanese than i, as well as paid attention to conversations in which aitsu comes up in both media and real-life japanese speakers and... guess waht. it's gender neutral. people use it to refer to women/girls/whatever all the time.

here's what aitsu is. it's a pronoun. you know. that you use when you feel like you're saying someone's name too much so you say "she" or "her" instead. sora just said namine's name two lines ago. of course he would swap to a pronoun. and maybe the ambiguity here is simply meant to mean he feels like he needs to apologize.... to either namine, for letting her down, or to *kairi, for forgetting her*, if we really want to insist there is some kind of ambiguity in place by sora using aitsu here.

but really? it's not that deep.

aitsu doesn't refer to some secret third person. the converastion is about namine, and sora's promise to her, and how sora feels about that promise, when he stands in the castle knowing that he hasn't held it up, hasn't protected her, and is rushing to find her - so fast that very soon he is going to *abandon donald and goofy* when they tell him he should slow down and think this through.

of course in this converastion aitsu = namine. that's just how *converastions work*

hypothetically, if i was talking to a friend (she/her) about what my boyfriend (he/him) did last weekend, it would go something like

me: oh yeah, my boyfriend loves taking pictures of the sky, we were up on that hiking trail for hours
friend: and you missed lunch!
me: and we missed lunch!! (fondly) [he's] always like this...

the [he's] where aitsu would theoreitcally go. guess what. there is no reason that i would secretly be referring to a third friend, or my mother, or something. *that's not what the converastion is about*

so:
1) it's not that deep
2) no, really, it is NOT that deep
3) aitsu is gender-neutral, yes, sora would use aitsu to refer to namine or kairi
4) there is not some hidden gay agenda that got translated out, the localizers of kh are and always have been pretty faithful. the only times i've seen them struggle is when the context wasn't clear (kh2 roxas voice so that's why they chose you)/they were forced to match lip flaps (kh2 donald voice i'm sorry about the ice cream), and guess what? the context is PERFECTLY clear here, and there isn't a SINGLE lip flap to match, becuase it's a text-only GBA game
5) not to make this about shipping but i do really sincerely doubt that the game that says at every moment KAIRI IS SO SPECIAL TO SORA AND THAT'S WHY NAMINE REPLACING KAIRI IN SORA'S MEMORIES WILL MAKE HIM OUR PUPPET BECAUSE HE WILL DO ANYTHING FOR NAMINE would be secretly trying to tell you that sora is talking about riku
6) can i just put the "there is no way they are referring to anyone other than kairi HOWEVER. what if i told you aitsu was a masc pronoun" on blast. like. god. a) it is not a masc only pronoun b) THE GAME JUST SHOWED YOU IN WAYS THAT TRANSCEND THE TEXT AND LANGUAGE THAT IT IS REFERRING TO KAIRI. ***OF COURSE THE GAME IS REFERRING TO KAIRI***