Custom Pronouns Break the World

Authoring Inform 7
2

I think the issue here is that male/female is set as a separate property from neuter/non-neuter. This is the code from the Standard Rules:

A person can be female or male. A person is usually male.
A person can be neuter. A person is usually not neuter.

So a person will always be male or female in the code, and may or may not be neuter on top of that. Then I think that the standard male/female stuff in the I6 is overridden for neuter persons (but I haven’t looked at the I6 so I’m not sure here).

So your enbies will generally be set to male and non-neuter as well as enby. If you do “showme Clover” you get this:

>showme clover
Clover - enby
location: in the Grammar Lab
singular-named, proper-named; unlit, inedible, portable; male, non-binary
list grouping key: none
printed name: “Clover”
printed plural name: “enbies”
indefinite article: none
description: none
initial appearance: none
carrying capacity: 10

Then in a rule like this from your extension:

To say we:
	now the prior named object is the player;
	if the story viewpoint is first person singular:
		say "I";
	if the story viewpoint is second person singular:
		say "you";
	if the story viewpoint is third person singular:
		if the player is male:
			say "he";
		if the player is non-binary:
			say "ey";
		otherwise:
			say "she";
	if the story viewpoint is first person plural:
		say "we";
	if the story viewpoint is second person plural:
		say "you";
	if the story viewpoint is third person plural:
		say "they".

The “if the player is male” and “if the player is non-binary” conditions are both firing, so you get “he” and “ey” right after each other.

One way to patch this up would be to switch the order around in those clauses like this:

		if the player is non-binary:
			say "ey";
		otherwise if the player is male:
			say "he";
		otherwise:
			say "she";

This first checks if the player is enby; then since the second clause is an “otherwise,” it doesn’t check it if the first test succeeded–so people who are enby and (internally) male will only get the enby pronoun printed.

Now, this is something that will only work for printing the pronouns. I’m not sure what the effect of the enbies being male/female in the internals will have on using pronouns to refer to them. That seems like it might be a harder problem that would really require diving into the I6.

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