Honestly if you ask me, I don't think it was really implied that it's their sanitization that gives way to their gender nonconformity, specifically since we see through all of their letters to Marina and their childhood photos that they get less conforming with time. Their tentacle style falls less and less in line with the Octoling soldier cut, and the increase in individuality via things like their increase in piercings throughout the photos implies to me they were already in-universe gnc pre-sanitization, and therefore most likely also nonbinary as well.
Of course the actual word "nonbinary" is... most likely inaccurate considering the source material. While it's very cool that Acht uses they/them and is, in my opinion, intended to be somewhat androgynous, I think the fact that their identity is never stated directly is somewhat an act of like... not actually wanting to fully commit to a nonbinary character. That said this is just me being a bit pedantic, even with my slight pessimism over how nonbinary and/or gnc characters are treated in popular media, the fact we even got they/them Acht in the first place is incredibly cool. And also very funny given that the only other non-player character to be they/them'd in Splatoon is... Orion. Who also has green skin. [Scoffs] Of course you have green skin and pronouns...
Which, side note just for me, one thing about Acht I find most damning in terms of how they're viewed by the game itself in terms of gender is how Marina accuses them of hitting on Pearl. Acht kind of has to be viewed as some form of genderless for that dialogue to even exist in my opinion, as while Pearl and Marina aren't subtle in terms of how they're being queercoded, given how Acht previously fulfilled a societally feminine role as a soldier, this would be much more blatantly gay if they weren't viewed as genderless. Though of course I'm still going to headcanon them as a nonbinary lesbian anyways...
Edit: oh yeah this is a thread about LGBT+ fans lol. I'm nonbinary and also a lesbian yippieeee
you get it!!!
yeah i agree, i
really don't think the cause and effect here was "acht got sanitized and lost their gender that way". at
most i think it'd be like how i pitched in my previous post - they were always gnc but weren't able to really figure out their identity until after they got away from the domes. and got their free will back after being sanitized. you could get into some fun headcanon-crafting about octarian gender roles and what it means to be trans or gnc as a 'female' octarian military trainee with that... though, really, you could get into the same headcanon-crafting if you interpret acht as having ID'd as nonbinary all along, and i lean towards believing that, tbh. i really just don't like the interpretation i've seen (again, not here, elsewhere online) that they use they/them because sanitization stripped them of their identity - not only does it have weird implications about nonbinary folks (hi, my gender isn't an
absence of an identity, thanks) but like. look at them. listen to their dialogue. do they
seem like they're an empty shell at the point side order happens???
as for whether it's accurate to call them 'nonbinary'... it'd be really cool if it was
confirmed that they identify that way, at least in the english localizations, but tbh i'd say it's safe to say the localization teams knew what they were doing by having a character (besides captain 3) be referred to with they/them. like, acht is a named, speaking, pretty major character in side order - there's not really any excuses of "they're a blank slate" or "the characters don't know anything about them" (that one especially -
marina knew them back in the octarian domes!) to hide behind.
(i'm struggling to phrase this next point but) it's also worth noting that, unless i'm forgetting something, none of the binary-gender characters
technically have it explicitly told how
they identify - their presentation, pronouns, and presence in a game made by a major company lead us to reading them one way or another. in this way, acht's gender sort of has the same treatment as the characters around them, y'know?
also yeah the flirting accusation dialogue is awesome because there's no possible 100% cishet gender conforming explanation for it. even if you ignore all the just-barely-still-subtext in pearl and marina's dialogue and you fill in the end of that line to be like, "in front of
Eight" or something, if you're trying to also deny that acht is nonbinary, your options are essentially: 1. insisting on reading acht as female, which makes it gay; 2. insisting it's
not gay because a character in a nintendo game who looks like this:
is
actually intended to be male (but like, not in a
trans way, guys)
