Worldbuilding as a Political Weapon

The words we choose shape and reshape our reality. Of course pronouns matter.

We live in times of weaponised pedantry, so let’s be clear: there’s a difference between a grammar Nazi and an actual Nazi.

Not everyone who likes to corral words into precisely ordered cages where they can be watched for signs or deviance will inevitably apply the same standards to people. On the contrary. There are plenty of gentle souls who truly believe the world could be perfected if only we all learned to use the Oxford comma correctly, and I wish them joy.

All the same, people who try to stop language changing don’t usually stop there. 

Words make the world, and remake it, and some people rail against that remaking on the level of grammar. Consider YouTuber HeelvsBabyface’s now-infamous critique of the new Starfield game, which has a feature that lets players to pick whatever pronoun they prefer for their character skin, regardless of body type. The now-viral rant has the mouthfeel of mundane edgelordery, but it’s more than that. It is, in fact, a tragic and rather beautiful performance piece about fear of change. 

There is nothing I love more than to sit down in a comfy chair, fire up a brand new RPG, lose myself, think oh my god, just think of this world, think of all the planets I can visit, all the immersive things I can get involved with, all the fights, all the relationships, all the people I meet, all the places I’ll go…..with all of that laid out in front of me I love nothing more than to be dragged out at every conceivable opportunity so you can fucking current day us!

Credit: YouTube/zEletrixx

All this over pronouns. It’s not as if Starfield is forcing you to play a non-binary pansexual space panther. You can be a normal boy, if you like. Nothing about this means the actual game experience needs to change. Except it does, doesn't it? It means that play starts in a world where you can choose - where other people actively  are choosing-  to delink gender from body type in a way that is both new and uncomfortably familiar. It means that in Starfield, having a dick doesn't automatically make you a man. And that’s a bit too current day for people like HeelvsBabyface, who would prefer his escape portal to take him to distant worlds without ever taking him out of his comfort zone. 

Fuck your immersion, fuck you having a good time, fuck you falling into a world and just getting lost....Sorry, dyou wanna get immersed in our world, yeah? Well guess what? Fucking pronouns! Fucking gender ambiguity! Cause that's all we fucking know! Cause we're boring!

And so on. The rant went as viral as anything can in this social media winter, and someone quickly made a game mod to give HeelvsBabyface exactly what he said he wanted and remove the  pronouns. All pronouns. So now everyone had to play as a they-them, which was exactly as silly as the situation demanded. HeelvsBabyface’s many detractors are still mocking him for being a whiny manbaby about it all. How absurd for anyone to throw such a tantrum about grammar. How embarrassing to be that old fashioned. Pronouns, as pedant-paladins in the comments pointed out, are a small, fundamental, morally neutral part of speech. This is completely true. 

But it’s not the whole truth.

---

Worldbuilding is political, always, and in speculative fiction and game design, the worlds we build are carefully constructed around the characters it contains and stories we plan to tell.  Carl Sagan tells us that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you first need to invent the universe. But when you invent a universe from scratch, every piece of pie can be politically significant.

Nobody’s out here arguing that all games should offer pronoun options. This is not about what all games should do, because there is nothing that all games should do, even if doing it would make them better games. But now, the ones that don’t allow pronoun choices will also have made a very deliberate design choice. Sex-assigned-at-build is not a default unless you make it so.

And if that were only happening in a game it would be fascinating; as something like it is also happening in the everyday world, it is simply too enormous for any one emotion.

The mechanics have changed. The idea that a person could simply change the pronouns they use, and in doing so change how they expected others to experience them, was almost unheard of at the turn of this century. If it hadn’t been, I’d have done it myself about a decade earlier. It’s pointless to pretend otherwise. 

We are a fragile species that craves both novelty and security, and rapid change can feel scary, and pronouns are a small, dull way to fight about a big, complex, rapidly changing issue. I understand why progressives don’t want to startle the crowd. But trying to persuade people that there hasn’t been an enormous honking paradigm shift, and it isn’t all that big of a deal, tends to backfire when everyone can feel the change. What happens instead is that people who were already uncomfortable also feel patronised and lied to. So yes, it’s technically true that people have been using singular ‘they’ for centuries, but that’s not helpful to someone still in the denial stage of mourning previously unexamined certainties, someone reacting to social change with a horrified paranoia that can often only understand itself as pedantry.

It is easier, after all, to argue with the words than it is to argue with the world. 

There's a long history of science fiction worldbuilding that gets creative with the grammatical basis of notional worlds. In Ursula K Le Guin’s The Dispossessed - probably my third favourite out of her Hainish cycle and notable for being the only sci-fi novel a certain sort of philosophy student has read - the inhabitants of the anarchist world Annares don’t use possessive pronouns. So on Annares, you don’t say my blanket, you say the blanket I use. And it’s not my town but the town I live in. Not my mother but the mother. 

The human brain compensates for changes in perspective: after a few hours of wearing light-inverting glasses, the brain adapts, so that when you take the glasses off, you’ll see a world turned upside down. The same is true for subtler shifts: only a few dozen pages into The Dispossessed, something switches in the way you think about ownership, about what it means to say of a place or a person: mine.

It’s such a little linguistic shift, but it unmakes the emotional architecture of the story. Because there’s a love story threaded through this book, too. It’s the story of Shevek and Takver, two shy people who met as children and want nothing else from love but to live together forever and raise a family. Nothing on their planet forbids Shevek and Takver from being each other's entire universe, but something at the level of language that makes it impossible to articulate. And it’s painful to read. You want Takver to be able to say “this is my husband” and “this is our house.” But she can’t, because she doesn’t have that language for that longing. Because we can only become what we can imagine, and we can only imagine what we can describe. 

That's how it felt when I started using they/them pronouns. Like the new lexicon reified a truth I’d been waiting to be allowed to live. Like I could suddenly speak the self I’d always wanted into being. And that was frightening, and thrilling, and I could not understand, at first, why it made some people so angry. Why it was any of their business what anyone else called myself. 

Credit: Insider Gaming/Bethesda

Worldbuilding is political, always, and in speculative fiction and game design, the worlds you build are designed specifically to contain the characters and stories you plan to tell. Carl Sagan tells us that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you first need to invent the universe. But when you invent a universe from scratch, every piece of pie is potentially political. Incidentally, Generative AI is particularly good at writing genre fiction, because in genre fiction the worldbuilding is finite and knowable. There is a complete set of rules, and the rules make more sense than real life. This is why large language models find fantasy fiction easier than real life. I for one have that in common with large language models. 

The actual world where you and I are born and eat breakfast and doomscroll and die is never so seamless. Not even close. Sure, it all hangs together or collapses on the sub-atomic level, but at human scale, stories make so much more sense than real life. In real life, you can spend painful decades being defined on terms you didn’t choose, carving yourself down to fit those contours, only to be told that this is, and perhaps always was, a choice. And even though you don't have to choose any different, you could. And that changes everything. The people you meet, the places you go, the relationships you have. The fights you’ll lay down every scrap of dignity for rather than look a certain sort of freedom in the face.

When we make it to the stars we will find our own worst selves waiting there to meet us. And I guarantee you that any future you care to imagine, when it arrives, will also ask us to put up pedantry, and pettiness, and cowardice, and we will have to tolerate each other through all of it. Through the terror and the danger and all the desires we’ve not yet found names for.

But, my god, think of that world.