# ‘I didn’t know they could one-shot me!’

Heather Burnett, Matthew Iver Loder

► To cite this version:

Heather Burnett, Matthew Iver Loder. ‘I didn’t know they could one-shot me!’. Gender and Language, 2024, 18 (1), pp.1-27. 10.1558/genl.23838. hal-04837996

HAL Id: hal-04837996

https://hal.science/hal-04837996v1

Submitted on 17 Dec 2024

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# I didn't know they could one-shot me!: Real time change in gender categories and pronoun use in the Dark Souls community

Heather Burnett (CNRS - Université Paris Cité) & Matthew I. Loder (New York University)

**Abstract:** This paper presents a corpus study spanning the past 11 years of language referring to Gwyndolin, a boss in the video game Dark Souls. Like many aspects of Dark Souls, Gwyndolin's gender is open to interpretation, and we track how both players' readings of Gwyndolin's gender and the pronouns that they use to refer to Gwyndolin have changed over the past decade. Our results show that, while players overwhelmingly read Gwyndolin as a cis man and use he, there are significant increases in trans and non-binary interpretations, as well as use of *they*, after 2015. We argue that the observed patterns are linked to social changes inside and outside video game culture occurring around 2014-2016. We thus provide valuable real time support for the existence of such a change in the pronoun system (and its relation to trans/non-binary identities), which had previously only been proposed based on apparent time data.

**Keywords:** "real-time language change", "singular they", "trans linguistics", "videogames", "Reddit", "Dark Souls"

**Funding:** This work was partially supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the program "Investissements d'Avenir" (reference: ANR-10-LABX-0083), and by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 850539).

## 1. Introduction

This paper presents new data and analysis of how changes in mental representations of gender categories affect pronoun use in English. Although English lacks the widespread grammatical gender agreement with nouns found in many other languages, it does have a rather robust gender marking system on pronouns. This is particularly the case for the third person, where English speakers distinguish between *he*, *she*, *they* and *it*, and these distinctions have consequences for agreement patterns (i.e., *she walks* vs *they walk*). Although the agreement patterns are relatively stable and clear, the use conditions of third person pronouns are less so, and much recent research into the English pronoun system has identified ways in which this system appears to be changing, especially with respect to the pronoun *they* in its singular use. While historically bound or epicene uses of singular *they* have long been observed, as in Bodine (1975); Curzan (2003); Balhorn (2004) and others, more recently researchers have observed that speakers have begun using singular *they* to refer to specific antecedents. For example, Bjorkman (2017) observes that
a certain class of what she calls “innovative” speakers accept the pronoun they co-indexed with definite descriptions describing individuals, such as in (1) (see also LaScotte 2016).

(1) (Bjorkman 2017:2)

(a) % The professorᵢ said theyᵢ cancelled the exam.

(b) % Our eldest childᵢ broke theirᵢ leg.

(c) % I'll let my cousinᵢ introduce themselvesᵢ.

Similarly, Conrod (2019, 2020) finds that younger speakers, particularly those under 30, are more likely to accept *they* co-indexed with a proper name (2-a) than older speakers[i]. This pattern contrasts with bound variable uses of *they*, such as (2-b), which Conrod finds to be relatively well accepted by speakers of all ages. Because of the age-based stratificational pattern that they observe in their study, Conrod hypothesizes that they are observing a change in “apparent time”; that is, age-based stratification patterns are evidence for actual language change (see Tagliamonte 2012) for an overview of the apparent time hypothesis).

(2) (a) Jaydenᵢ forgot theirᵢ homework.

(b) Everyoneᵢ forgot theirᵢ homework.

That apparent time hypothesis is also adopted by Konnelly and Cowper (2020), where they establish a three-stage process of ongoing language change: they distinguish between stage 1 speakers, who only accept singular *they* with bound and non-specific or gender neutral antecedents (2-b); stage 2 speakers (1), who accept definite but not all named/gendered noun antecedents; and stage 3 speakers, who accept *they* with any antecedent, including examples like (2-a).

Our paper builds on previous research into change in English pronoun use, approaching the phenomenon from a “real time” angle, rather than an “apparent time” one. Like Bjorkman, Konnelly, Cowper and Conrod, we focus on the use of third person pronouns referring to singular individuals, and we present a corpus study spanning the past 11 years (2011-2022). These previous studies have suggested there is an age-based stratification in the usage of third person pronouns in English, and we argue that such our study will, in principle, allow us to observe these recent changes more directly.

Of course, there have been many other corpus studies tracking singular *they* in a variety of media (for example Bodine 1975, Matossian 1997, Baranowski 2002, Paterson 2011, among others). However, the one presented here is specifically designed to investigate another key aspect of this change: its relation to possible changes in gender ideologies. As described by Bjorkman, Conrod and others, the specific changes in grammatical acceptability described above appear to be occurring in conjunction with changes in English speakers’ understanding of social gender and perhaps even in their representations of the gender categories themselves. For example, in addition to the age effect, Conrod (2019:114) found that participants in their study who identify
as trans were statistically more likely to accept singular *they* with proper names than those who
did not, and Bradley (2020) and Ackerman, Riches & Wallenberg (2018) find the same pattern
for non-binary participants in similar acceptability studies. Moreover, all of Konnelly and
Cowper (2020)'s stage 3 speakers were either non-binary or binary-gendered with at least one
non-binary family member.

These authors' results strongly suggest that there is some linguistic change in progress, and that
it is related to increased consciousness, acceptance and adoption of trans and non-binary gender
identities. This paper aims to test the hypothesis of such a combined linguistic and ideological
change through diachronic corpus data. More specifically, we present a study of the use of
pronouns to refer to Dark Sun Gwyndolin, a boss in the video game *Dark Souls* (FromSoftware
2011), on the forum Reddit. Although *Dark Souls* was only a moderate hit for FromSoftware at
launch, it has since because a cult classic, and each successful FromSoftware release (from
*Bloodborne* (2015) and *Dark Souls 3* (2016), to *Elden Ring* (2022)) draws new players onto
forums to discuss its gameplay and lore. Thus, unlike for many older games, the *Dark Souls*
subreddit continues to thrive, providing a large corpus documenting discussions about the game
for over a decade.

In addition to its extreme difficulty, *Dark Souls* is known for its use of environmental
storytelling. A term originally developed in theme park design (Carson 2000), environmental
storytelling refers to “the art of arranging a careful selection of the objects available in a game
world so that they suggest a story to the player who sees them”[ii]. Rather than having narrative
cutscenes, in *Dark Souls*, the “story” is told through aspects of the game’s setting, item
descriptions and often cryptic dialogue from non-playable characters. According to interviews,
the director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, “wanted to recreate the experience he’d had when reading
books as a child, when large portions of the plot were beyond his understanding. Consuming
literature that went on to heavily influence his games, including interactive dark fantasy stories
like Steve Jackson’s *Sorcery!* gamebooks, he used his imagination to fill in the gaps when his
abilities to understand the words fell short”[iii]. Because players are required to use their
pre-existing ideological categories and interpretive schemas to fill in the narrative gaps, we argue
that environmental storytelling provides a privileged way to access and study these categories
and schemas, and we illustrate this point with Gwyndolin.

Like many other aspects of the plot of the game, Gwyndolin's gender is open to interpretation.
Consequently, we observe that Gwyndolin is variably referred to with *he, she, they* or a mixed
form by players on forums such as Reddit (3). These examples are taken from our corpus of
Reddit posts and comments referring to Gwyndolin from 2011 to 2022, which we constructed for
this paper.

(3) (a) all of **his** attacks near one shot me if i dont roll away properly

(2021)
(b) So I activated Dark Londo and headed to fight Gwyndolin. **She** fucked me up my first try. (2015)

(c) And when I got to gwyndolin, I had died (I didn't know **they** could one shot me) (2022)

(d) Gwyndolin is actually a pretty fun boss so far, but **he/she/they (?)** have a ton of insta-kill attacks (2016)

Since *Dark Souls* adopts an environmental storytelling approach to narrative, in which players are required to privilege their own interpretations over “the author’s truth” (see Jongeneel 2013, for discussion), we argue that studying a corpus of references to Gwyndolin spanning the past 11 years gives us a unique opportunity to investigate not only how pronoun variation might change, but also how the gender categories that speakers are mobilizing might change as well. The main result of our paper is that we find diachronic corpus evidence for change in both how players interpret Gwyndolin’s gender and how they use pronouns to refer to Gwyndolin. Further, we suggest that these patterns can be linked to socio-cultural changes within the *Dark Souls* community (particularly following the #GamerGate movement in 2014), and to broader cultural and political changes related to the institutionalization of trans and non-binary identities across the anglophone world post 2015.

In addition to furthering our understanding of changes in English pronoun use and gender categories, this paper also makes a contribution to the burgeoning field of *ludolinguistics*; that is, the study of language and video games (see Ensslin 2012, Goux 2022, and Heritage 2022 for descriptions). Video games have enormous social, cultural and economic significance, and video games constitute large and growing industries in North America, Europe and Asia. However, works by linguists on the language within and about videogames are relatively rare. We therefore hope that this paper can further exemplify the kind of work that can take place within ludolinguistics, and serve as inspiration for future research.

The paper is laid out as follows: in section 2, we present a short literature review of video games, gender and linguistics. Then, in section 3, we present our quantitative corpus study of variation and change in pronouns referring to Gwyndolin on Reddit from 2011 to 2022. We will show that the patterns of use of *he, she, they* and other forms to refer to this boss change during the time period studied, particularly with respect to *they*. In order to help explain the observed quantitative patterns, in section 4, we present both a qualitative and a quantitative study of the terms players use to qualify Gwyndolin, particularly those that reference gender and sexual identity. We argue that the meta-discourse around Gwyndolin's gender identity also changes, particularly after 2015 when, we argue, issues related to gender identity and diversity became salient to *Dark Souls* players. Finally, section 5 concludes with remarks concerning gender, pronoun use and video game culture more generally.

## 2. Video games, gender and ludolinguistics
The study of gender in relation to video (or computer) games is almost as old as video/computer
games themselves. Already in the 1980s, researchers investigated whether or not there were
gender differences in video game use (C. Weil 1980), and whether the declining interest of
women and girls in video/computer games observed at the end of the 1980s could be the result of
the way in which women and girls were depicted in them. These issues drew much attention in
both business and academic circles in the 1990s (see, for example, E. Weil 1997, Cassell &
Jenkins 1998). The interest in how gender is represented in video games, and how players
interpret and talk about gender among each other, has only increased in the past decade with the
events surrounding #GamerGate in 2014 and 2015. Although sometimes described as a social
movement for “ethics in video game journalism”, #GamerGate is more accurately described as a
“misogynistic online harassment campaign and right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity
and progressivism in video game culture”[xiii]. The violence of #GamerGate shed light on the
often highly problematic gendered aspects of videogame culture, and sparked new interest in
how gender is constructed in video games and on video game fora (see Derr 2020 for a recent
example). Along with a focus on how stereotypical the representation of men and women in
games can be, recent years have also seen an interest in how non-stereotypical and/or minority
genders can be constructed in games (Harper et al. 2018, Thach 2021, Heritage 2022, Kosciesza
2023, among many others). Our paper picks up where these other works leave off and present a
study of a somewhat different kind of gender construction: an ambiguous one. As mentioned in
the introduction, Gwyndolin’s gender is not completely specified by the game. The first thing to
note about this character is that Gwyndolin is an optional hidden boss in Dark Souls 1. The
player may encounter Gwyndolin in the second half of the game after finding a special key item
(the *Darkmoon Seance Ring*) which opens a secret door to a passage leading to Gwyndolin’s
boss area. The door is hidden by a large statue of Gwyn, the principal antagonist of the game,
who is also Gwyndolin’s father. When the player is directly outside the area, Gwyndolin (voiced
by cis-male actor Harry Lister Smith) addresses the player asking them to kneel and not enter the
area, thereby joining the Blade of the Darkmoon Covenant. If the player does not obey and
instead enters the arena, Gwyndolin will call them foolish and proceed to fight them. The fight
involves the player chasing the boss down a seemingly endless hallway while Gwyndolin,
dressed in a white dress with snakes for legs and clearly defined breasts, shoots magic at the
player before teleporting away. If/when the player successfully defeats the boss, Gwyndolin
curses and them and calls them a heretic. A voice that clearly indexes masculinity paired with a
body clearly indexing femininity is one of the sources of the ambiguity surrounding Gwyndolin’s
gender. This ambiguity is further reinforced by item descriptions in the game, which use the
pronouns *he/him* to refer to Gwyndolin, but state that Gwyndolin was “raised as a daughter”[iv].
Note that not all players will have exactly the same information about this boss’ gender. Players
can also reach Gwyndolin’s boss fight by attacking Gwyndolin’s sister, Gwynavere (another
NPC), thereby revealing the sister to be an illusion created by Gwyndolin. In this case, another
NPC, a firekeeper, will attack the player for offending who she calls “Master Gwyndolin”. So
players who chose this path will have additional dialogue that could reinforce a masculine interpretation.

Although there is much research on gender and/in video games, far fewer studies have looked at how they interact with language. Important work has been done by Carrillo Masso (2009, 2011), who shows that, on the World of Warcraft publisher's websites and in player forums about the game, there were three times as many *he* pronouns as *she* pronouns. As Ensslin (2012) observes (p.86), this result is particularly striking since there are an equal number of female and male avatar types to choose from. The existence of imbalances in pronouns and nouns related to women and men have also been observed for many other games by scholars working in corpus-assisted discourse analysis such as Heritage (2021), Stefani (2022) and Erdur (2022).

Our study again aims to contribute to this line of work, but from a different theoretical perspective. Our study is based on variationist principles (see Labov 1973, Tagliamonte 2012) which allow us to systematically track potential changes in grammar and in conceptual representations across time. We will start by presenting a variationist study of pronoun use in a corpus of discussions about Gwyndolin.

# 3. Variation and change in pronouns

## 3.1 Methodology

To investigate variation in pronoun use over time in the *Dark Souls* community on Reddit, we developed a corpus of the contributions (i.e. posts and comments) on the forum Reddit which discussed Gwyndolin. More specifically, we found all occurrences of the expression *Gwyndolin* from the initial posts in the *Dark Souls*jon, and then further extracted the comments from each of the threads headed by posts mentioning Gwyndolin. We chose to study the contributions on Reddit because, as described by (Proferes et al. 2021:1), “Reddit has become one of the most prominent social platforms on the web with 52 million daily active users (Reddit.com 2020a) and over 138,000 active topical communities”. Thus, we expected that Reddit would be the forum in which we could find the most freely available data on players discussing Gwyndolin.

The data were extracted using both the *Pushshift* API (PSAW) and the Python Reddit API Wrapper (PRAW). *Pushshift*, founded in 2015 by Jason Baumgartner, is an online, independent database for maintaining and archiving social media data. Rather than querying Reddit's data directly using PRAW, we first conducted a search of the posts through PSAW, due to a greater ease of use and a larger querying limit (Baumgartner et al. (2020)). Then, using PRAW, we downloaded all relevant information, including the comments associated with each of these posts. Thus, our first dataset consisted of 8,373 contributions (posts or comments).
Once the data were collected, we saved them as spreadsheets including relevant metadata, such as the poster, title, post/comment and thread ids, and year published, as well as the content from the post/comment (and the parent post in the case of comments). Using a simple spreadsheet software, we then proceeded to code by hand each contribution containing a pronoun referring to Gwyndolin with the form of that pronoun. We coded by contribution rather than by occurrence because the contributions were generally quite short, rarely containing more than a single site where a pronoun could be used. Furthermore, in the rare cases where a single contribution contained multiple pronouns referring to Gwyndolin, it was even rarer for the writer to use more than one pronoun. As shown in the introduction, there were uses of *he* (3-a), *she* (3-b) and *they* (3-c) which were relatively straightforward to code into three separate homogeneous categories. The mixed category, however, is much more varied. In this category, we included composite forms, where writers concatenate gender pronouns together using a slash, a parenthesis or some other form of punctuation, conjunctions or disjunctions of pronouns (4), and the very rare instances where contributors actually used multiple pronouns in a single contribution (5). In cases where there was any doubt whether or not a pronoun was being used to refer to Gwyndolin, we flagged these contributions and discussed each before coming to a consensus.

(4) (a) Bad ass! I've yet to encounter **him/her** but I'm very familiar with **his/her** lore (2018)
(b) I think you should carry on fighting Gwyndolin properly, but if it becomes to infuriating, if you've nearly gone hollow, there is an easy/cheesy way to beat **him/her/zim/zher** (2017)

(5) (a) Gwyndolyn probably isn't trans. **He** was raised as a women but that wasn't **his** choice. The illusion of Gwynavire that Gwyndolyn creates themselves refers to **them** as their brother, which is pretty telling imo (2022)
(b) Your point about missing dodges accurately explains the 10 times I've ever actually tried to fight **her... er ... him**. (2016)

In addition to pronouns, we also considered including a “repetition of proper name” category into our quantitative analysis. This is a well-known strategy to avoid using pronouns, and indeed even features in some people’s preferred self-reference (see the discussion in Baron 2020). There are in fact some examples in our corpus that could very well be instances of pronoun avoidance through repetition, such as (6). On the other hand, most examples featuring two or more proper names are not obviously cases where the author is consciously using the proper name in order to avoid a pronoun. Because of our inability to make reliable judgments of a “pronoun avoidance” strategy, we did not include “proper name repetition” as a variant in our quantitative analysis.

(6) I know that if you destroy the illusion, firekeeper attacks and **Gwyndolin** turns hostile. However, whenever I die to **Gwyndolin** or to some invader in Dark Anor Londo, I always get thrown into the dead bonfire where the firekeeper originally was. I go back to the bridge and find out the rotating staircase is facing towards **Gwyndolin**. (2015)
Finally, there were a very small number (7 in total) of occurrences of *it*. These fell into two categories: references not to Gwyndolin as an individual, but to *Gwyndolin* as naming the event that is Gwyndolin's boss fight, and the de-humanizing *it* which arises in meta-discussions of Gwyndolin's gender. Since the number of *its* was so small, we did not include them in our quantitative analysis.

Our final dataset thus consisted of 1665 occurrences of *he, she, they* or some mixed expression, across 12 years (2011-2012). The breakdown in occurrences by year in our dataset is shown in Table 1.

<table><caption>**Table 1** – Number of occurrences of pronouns referring to Gwyndolin by year (2011-2022)</caption><thead><tr><th>2011</th><th>2012</th><th>2013</th><th>2014</th><th>2015</th><th>2016</th><th>2017</th><th>2018</th><th>2019</th><th>2020</th><th>2021</th><th>2022</th><th>Total</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>47</td><td>109</td><td>1</td><td>35</td><td>108</td><td>263</td><td>113</td><td>82</td><td>155</td><td>177</td><td>568</td><td>107</td><td>1665</td></tr></tbody></table>

As this table shows, the amount of data that we have at each year is highly variable. We suspect this has to do with a combination of the fact that Reddit has been growing enormously over time (Proferes et al. 2021) and the “life cycle” of the game: *Dark Souls* launched in fall 2011 on the PS3 and XBox360 consoles, and in summer 2012 on PC. It therefore makes sense that the bulk of the discussion on Reddit about this game would be in 2011 and 2012. We hypothesize that discussion picks back up in 2015-2017 with the releases of *Dark Souls 2* (2014), *Bloodborne* (2015), and especially *Dark Souls 3* (2016), since the latter also features a version of Gwyndolin. Presumably the success of these subsequent games, particularly the sequels, caused new players to seek out and play *Dark Souls 1* in these later years, and then to go onto forums like Reddit to discuss Gwyndolin's boss fight and lore. The game was then remastered for the new generation of consoles (PS4, XboxOne and Switch) in 2018, which presumably sustains the discussion until 2022, when it is again revitalized by the launch of *Elden Ring*. In the rest of the paper, we therefore always include some measure of normalization across the different time periods, in addition to the raw counts of the lexical items that we are interested in.

## 3.2 *Results*

The breakdown of pronoun forms according to time is shown in Table 2. Because of the variable amounts of data at each year, we have chosen to present the pronoun use patterns in three groups: 2011-2014, 2015-2018, 2019-2022.

**Table 2** – References to Gwyndolin in a corpus of Reddit posts and comments (statistically significant differences bolded)
<table><thead><tr><th>Pronoun</th><th>2011-14</th><th>2015-18</th><th>2019-22</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>He</td><td>179 (93%)</td><td>391 (84%)</td><td>857 (85%)</td></tr><tr><td>She</td><td>7 (4%)</td><td>26 (5.5%)</td><td>62 (6%)</td></tr><tr><td>They</td><td><strong>0</strong></td><td><strong>12 (2.5%)</strong></td><td><strong>60 (6%)</strong></td></tr><tr><td>Mixed</td><td>6 (3%)</td><td>37 (8%)</td><td>28 (3%)</td></tr><tr><td>Total</td><td>194</td><td>466</td><td>1007</td></tr></tbody></table>

The first observation that springs out of this table is the incredible dominance of the masculine pronoun *he*. To a certain extent, this is unsurprising. As mentioned in the introduction, the item descriptions in the game that mention Gwyndolin use *he/him*, so players who know this will almost certainly take this into consideration when they are talking about this boss. This being said, because of Dark Souls' narrative style, it is unclear how much influence those item descriptions have on most players' productions, since many (if not most) players don't take the time to study the items. In the words of Jongeneel (2013), “As [environmental storytelling] is part of the game-world itself and the player is able to traverse the world at his or her own pace, the issue of the player walking past a clue without giving it another glance will always be present. Some players actively scour the area for clues, but others have the opinion that if something does not move it is of no importance.” Thus, it is unlikely that the presence of *he* in item descriptions is solely responsible for this extreme pattern. Rather, another likely contributing factor is players' reading Gwyndolin's gender as one that can be picked out with the pronoun, *he*. We will describe what those interpretations are in the next section.

The other striking pattern shown in Table 2 is the evolution of *they*: before 2015, there are no clear occurrences of *they* referring to Gwyndolin (but see endnote for two ambiguous cases).[v] However, in the most recent period (post 2019), *they* constitutes 6% of the total pronominal forms. Using logistic regression in R (lme4 package (Bates, 2014))[vi], we found that the increase in occurrences of *they* alone or in mixed forms from before 2019 to after is statistically significant ($\beta$ = 0.775, $e^\beta$ =2.170, 95% CI = [0.186, 1.363], p < 0.01). We therefore conclude that many Dark Souls players have changed the way that they refer to Gwyndolin in the past decade.

It is possible that the rise of *they* is not the only change that we see. In addition to ‘they’, we ran several tests considering occurrences of ‘he’ alone, and ‘she’ alone or in mixed forms. The results of these tests are shown in Table 3 below, where we also include a Holm-Bonferroni corrected p-value.

<caption>**Table 3:** Results of statistical analyses for changes in use of *she* and *he*</caption>
<table><thead><tr><th>Form</th><th>Comparison</th><th>β</th><th>Odds ratio (e<sup>β</sup>)</th><th>95% CI</th><th>p-value</th><th>Corrected p-value</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>'he'</td><td>2011-2014 vs. 2015-2018</td><td>-0.584</td><td>0.558</td><td>[-1.118, -0.050]</td><td>0.0321</td><td>0.096</td></tr><tr><td>'he'</td><td>2015-2018 vs. 2019-2022</td><td>0.016</td><td>1.016</td><td>[-0.283, 0.315]</td><td>0.916</td><td>-</td></tr><tr><td>Contains 'she'</td><td>2011-2014 vs. 2015-2018</td><td>0.785</td><td>2.192</td><td>[0.083, 1.487]</td><td>0.0284</td><td>0.1136</td></tr><tr><td>Contains 'she'</td><td>2015-2018 vs. 2019-2022</td><td>-0.378</td><td>0.685</td><td>[-0.755, -0.002]</td><td>0.0491</td><td>0.0982</td></tr></tbody></table>

While the percentage of *he* goes down slightly to the benefit of *they*, *he’s* decline from before to after 2015 is also to the benefit of *she*, which rises from 4% pre-2015, to 6% afterwards (Table 2). Considering occurrences of *she*, alone or in mixed forms, we found that, uncorrected, there was a significant increase in *she* from before 2015 to after 2015 (Table 3). We further observe a decrease in the use of forms that contain *she*, which can be explained, at least in part, by the decrease in the use of mixed forms, to the benefit of *they*.

In order to investigate the sources of the rise of *they* (and possibly *she*), to the detriment of *he*, we decided to look at the gender category labels that contributors in our corpus were applying to Gwyndolin.

# 4. Variation and change in gender categories

In this section, we present a study of the gender labels that writers in our corpus apply to Gwyndolin. The goal is to investigate whether the changes in pronoun use could be mirrored by corresponding changes in how players interpret Gwyndolin’s gender in the past decade.

Before we continue, we would like to warn the reader that the following section contains some quoted examples of misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic speech. We have tried to include only the examples that are necessary for our academic arguments.

## 4.1 Methodology

Our goal in this section is to better understand how ideas about gender and the language used to describe it changed within the Reddit corpus that we created. During the initial coding of the corpus, we made notes on the gender terms and interpretations that writers were using. As mentioned in the introduction, the previous experimental and syntactic literatures on singular *they* have suggested some link between the evolution of gender categories and the evolution of pronoun use. Since our aim in this paper is to test this hypothesis diachronically, we limited our attention specifically to gender identity labels, setting aside gendered function nouns, such as
prince or princess, and terms of address, such as man, dude, or guy, which were ubiquitous throughout the corpus.

In a second pass through our corpus, we read through each contribution to pull out relevant gender terms used. Once this was done, we returned to the corpus and performed a more fine-grained search, verifying that each instance of each term was used to refer to Gwyndolin specifically, and that the usage of the term was consistent with the poster's expectations about the character. When interpretations were unclear, we discussed before coming to a consensus. We were then able to produce counts of total occurrences of each term of interest, as well as to see when various terms appeared in the corpus to refer specifically to Gwyndolin.

## 4.2 Results

We found several interesting readings of Gwyndolin's gender that are relevant to highlight through examples. These examples vary in terms of the importance that they place on gender, on the posters' apparent assumptions about links between gender, sex, and sexuality, on the certainty that the writer displays, and on the broad interpretive schema that the writer appears to be applying.

Highly prevalent throughout the corpus is an interpretation reading Gwyndolin as a feminine cis man. This reading is exemplified by the example in (7), which simply states that Gwyndolin is a feminine cis man.

(7) Gwyndolin is a feminine man. It really isn't much more complex than that. (2021)

Other examples of the “cis man” interpretation include analyses in which Gwyndolin’s being raised “as a daughter” (according to item descriptions) has no bearing on Gwyndolin’s gender identity. As shown in (8), such views are often presented as counterpoints to analyses of Gwyndolin as trans, which we will discuss below.

(8) (a) Yea, I think the reaching part is the trans part. Nowhere in the lore does it say **he**'s a male who wants to be female or is really female in a male body or anything even close to that. It's just a male who was raised more feminine, but is most certainly still male (2021)

(b) Gwyndolyn probably isn't trans. **He** was raised as a women but that wasn't his choice. The illusion of Gwynavire that Gwyndolyn creates **themselves** refers to **them** as **their** brother, which is pretty telling imo (2022)

The “feminine cis man” interpretation is closely related to another interpretation which brings sexuality into the mix: Gwyndolin is a (cis) gay man. An example is shown in (9).

(9) Before or after Gwyn decided the moon was gay and so was his son[vii] ? (2021)
Analyses of Gwyndolin as a cis man, who happens to be gay or effeminate, are by far the most common interpretations of Gwyndolin's gender. This is in line with the observation that there is a tendency in western cultures, and in spaces where western ideals of gender and sexuality compete with local identities, to read people with unconventional gender presentation as effeminate gay men or masculine women respectively, rather than trans, non-binary or third gender options (Zimman 2020; Hall 2005, 2009). This tension is further highlighted in Stryker (2008), where we observe a pervasive historical trend recognizing gay, lesbian and bisexual identities long before trans identities and contributing to the continued marginalization of transfolk. On the other hand, the existence of a norm for binarity does not explain why we find absolutely no contributions in which players explicitly argue that Gwyndolin is a cis woman, masculine, lesbian or otherwise. In this way, most players' preference for a (cis) binary interpretation coincides with a preference for an androcentric interpretation.

The fact that “cis man” is the most frequent interpretation of Gwyndolin’s gender in our data supports previous research showing that much of video game culture is at least androcentric, if not openly misogynist (see Cassell and Jenkins, 1998, and very much subsequent work on this topic). As Massanari (2017) shows, this is particularly the case for video game communities of practice centered around Reddit. Because of Reddit’s high level of anonymity, we have almost no information about the demographic properties (age, gender, social class) of the players in our corpus. However, we can make some estimates based on other information available. For example, as described in Proferes et al. (2021), according to Reddit’s site administrators “a majority (58%) of users are between 18 and 34 years old and are male (57%)” (Proferes et al. 2021:2).

This (age-related) statistic corresponds well to self-surveys in the *Dark Souls* subreddit [viii], which generally conclude that most players are in their mid twenties. Furthermore, although many estimates of the video game industry as a whole consider the breakdown of players to be roughly gender balanced (ESA 2021), other studies, such as Quantic Foundry’s 2017 survey, point out that gender balance varies enormously according to game genre. Action role-playing games like *Dark Souls* are estimated to have only 20% female players [ix]. In other words, games like *Dark Souls* are made predominantly by men for men, and the background assumption in these communities is that everyone engaging with this content is a (straight) man. This androcentric attitude is well illustrated by the quotation from our corpus in (10), where the writer both comments on the misogyny of the subreddit members and implies that none of the *Dark Souls* subs are women (see also Cameron, 1992).

(10) yeah the souls subs are cringe as hell whenever a woman is in front of them tbh (2022)

It is not, however, the only interpretation. Another group of players find the fantasy aspect of *Dark Souls* particularly salient and attribute Gwyndolin’s gender non-conforming aspects to Gwyndolin’s demi-god status (11).
(11) Gwyndolin's whole man/woman thing always struck me as less about modern political fads and more about "the weird kind of stuff gods and goddesses get up to in mythology."
Cronus castrating his father, Aphrodite being born out of testicular sea foam, Zeus siring kids with mortal moms, etc. [...] It's much easier to believe Gwyndolin is an homage to that style of storytelling than that **he (she?)** was presaging an ideology that barely anyone cared about or knew existed in 2011.
(2021)

Like those in (8), the posts in (11) are taken from threads debating Gwyndolin's possible trans identity, and the "mythical being whose gender we can't comprehend" analysis is presented as a competitor to one in which Gwyndolin is trans, non-binary or has some other non-cis gender identity. In fact, players in our corpus use a long list of terms to describe non-cis male identity. We have categorized these terms into four groupings: a list of preferred terms, terms that we know of modern individuals using to refer to themselves; a list of outdated terms, which may at one point have been used innocently, but which now carry strong negative connotations, terms that many (but not all) find insulting, and terms which are unambiguously insulting.

(12) (a) **Neutral/preferred terms:** Trans, transgender, genderqueer, transmasc(uline), trans man, FtM, AFAB, trans woman, non-binary, intersex
(b) **Outdated terms (negative connotation):** Transsexual, hermaphrodite, transvestite, crossdresser
(c) **Contentious terms:** femboy, ladyboy
(d) **Insults:** Trap, shem*le[x]

In our corpus, we find players who interpret Gwyndolin as a trans woman, as shown in (13), and we also find players who interpret Gwyndolin as a trans man (14).

(13) (a) I've always interpreted Gwyndolin as a trans woman whose family is very very transmisogynistic
(2021)
(b) Gwyndolin was born a male but raised a girl because of **her** affinity for the moon, a feminine interest. [...] **She** is very, very trans coded and to deny all of that and just be like, "Well they use he/him" as the only counter evidence in a culture that is notorious for misgendering trans characters is ignorant and dismissive.
(2019)

(14) Afaik Gwyndolin refers to himself as male by using "brother" with gwyneveres illusion. Gwyndolin sees **himself** as a boy while being assigned female at birth despite his sex being male. **He** is ftm, so yes **he's** trans.
(2021)

While some players appear confident in their reading of Gwyndolin's gender, others are not so sure. For example, although the player in (15) believes it to be canon that a demi-god whose lower half consists of snakes is 'biologically male', this player prefers to defer to other trans players for the final interpretation of their gender.
(15) it's canon that gwyndolin was born biologically male, but was raised female by gwyn due to **their** affinity with dark magic. here's where it gets more complex and dynamic, and you have to start asking questions. is this a trans-related matter? quite possibly. is there transphobia of the auteur being coded into this? who can say. if you look at the fanbase, you see arguments for either side, if gwyndolin is male, or if **they** are a trans woman. in matters like these, i tend to lean toward the opinions of those who are trans themselves, because they have direct experience with dealing other peoples' perception of their gender.
(2020)

Finally, we also find players who read Gwyndolin's gender as non-binary (16) or intersex (17).

(16) Why does **he** have to be either? I mean one very valid reading of Gwyndolin is that **his** gender is not a critical part of **his** identity– I think an NB interpretation is perfectly valid (2021)

(17) I always assumed **he** was born Intersex (between the two biological sexes) and instead of a coin toss, **his** guardians said “We sense affinity for moon magic, so girl?” But when Gwyndolin was old enough for **himself**, **he** choose male. (2021)

In summary, in our corpus, although most players appear to interpret Gwyndolin as a cis man, many players interpret Gwyndolin's gender in a wide variety of ways, including a genderless demigod, a trans man or woman or even a non-binary or intersex person. We would now like to know if we can observe changes in the distributions of these interpretations through time, in a way that might parallel the changes that we observed in the pronouns.

We highlight again that the fact that we are looking at a fictional character in an environmental storytelling medium allows us to draw conclusions about possible changes in players' mental representations in a way that would not be possible if we were to study an actual person or even a character in a work of fiction with a more deterministic structure. While studies of references to real life trans people can be very enlightening for studying how individuals do (not) adopt the pronoun use patterns preferred these individuals (see, for example, Gupta 2019), a format in which speakers are freer to interpret as they see fit, rather than in the way they view as “correct”, provides more insight into the question of how people’s mental inventories of gender categories might change, and how those changes may be related to pronoun use.

The gamers themselves are conscious of this distinction, and many refer to it as the difference between canon 'interpreting the way that Miyazaki/FromSoftware intended' and head canon 'interpreting the way that pleases you the most'.

(18) In canon Gwyndolin is male. Descriptions are very clear on this, he was raised female due to his association with the moon, meaning learned female studies, and wore female robes.
**He** however is male. None of the descriptions on this or comments from NPCs are speculative.

However as headcannon, I can see a lot of people wanting Gwyndolin to be a trans icon and seeing **him** as such, as **he's** a badass and seems relatively unaffected by **his** gender, Gwyndolin would be the same whether male or female, making **him** (intentionally or not) pretty good commentary on an issue that had yet to hit the mainstream eye.

However if we're only talking lore, yeah **he** a dude. (2021)

Indeed, many players in our corpus are explicit that they interpret Gwyndolin's gender according to their own worldview (19).

(19) Well yeah that's what I had in mind. **He** was raised and acted as a girl. I think that's kind of cool honestly. It's just fun little headcannon as of now. I mean being trans myself I like to think of so many characters as trans than actually are lol, it's just fun.

Even for those players interested in the “correct” interpretation of Gwyndolin’s gender, there is evidence that a large chunk of what they consider canon actually comes from their head canon. For example, players frequently appeal to biological characteristics like chromosomes or genitals in their arguments about Gwyndolin’s gender; however, Gwyndolin’s genetic makeup (which includes magical powers and snakes from the waist down) is extremely unclear.

(20) (a) **He** has a penis. **He** was assigned female. **His** gender identity is in congruent with **his** socially assigned gender. [...] You seem to be under the impression that the presence of a penis, and Gwyndolin identifying with what the penis represents, means he's not trans. What makes **him** trans isn't the relation between **his** gender identity & **his** genitals. It's the relation between **his** identity, and what **his** tribe decided **his** identity was supposed to be based on some arbitrary factor, in this case **his** affinity to the moon rather than as with most trans people, **his** genitals. (2021)

(b) I'm not sure the language we use for sex and gender 100% translates to a world where a ring can change your physical characteristics. I mean, if Gwyn decided at the time of Gwyndolin's birth (or shortly after) that **he** should be raised as female, and if **he** had feminine secondary sex characteristics for most of **his** life, I think there's a case for saying **he** is basically AFAB even if he has the god equivalent of XY chromosomes. (2021)

Since aspects of Gwyndolin's biology are extremely unclear in the game, comments that refer to biological characteristics are clearly instances of players first attributing a gender category to Gwyndolin and then drawing inferences about Gwyndolin's biology from this gender category (see Ackerman 2019, for a detailed discussion of different ways defining and talking about gender and its cognitive representations).
In order to assess whether there were changes in the ways that Dark Souls players were categorizing Gwyndolin throughout the past decade, we counted the occurrences of the labels for non-cis male identities identified in the previous section.

Table 4 below shows the occurrences of preferred identity terms for trans, non-binary and intersex as both raw counts and percentages of total posts and comments. As discussed in section 3, because our data is unequally distributed across time periods, the relevant number to compare between columns is the percentage, rather than the raw counts. Note that these are occurrences of these terms attributed specifically to Gwyndolin, not total counts, something that we verified by hand.

<table><caption>**Table 4** – Counts & percentages of preferred terms over time</caption><thead><tr><th>Term</th><th>2011-14</th><th>2015-18</th><th>2019-22</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Trans</td><td>2 (0.19%)</td><td>7 (0.29%)</td><td>87 (1.79%)</td></tr><tr><td>Trans man</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>26 (0.53%)</td></tr><tr><td>Trans Woman</td><td>2 (0.19%)</td><td>2 (0.08%)</td><td>17 (0.35%)</td></tr><tr><td>Non-binary</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>6 (0.12%)</td></tr><tr><td>Intersex</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>4 (0.08%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Table 4 shows that there was a marked increase in the use of trans and related terms to describe Gwyndolin, with the biggest jump being in the period from 2019 to 2022. We also only see occurrences of *non-binary* during that most recent period. This pattern mirrors almost exactly the rise of singular they that we observed in the previous section (see Table 2). In order to go deeper into the relationship between the increases of *they* and trans and non-binary identity terms, we identified by hand all of the contributions in which the writer communicated both a clear gender interpretation and used a relevant pronoun, i.e. examples such as (16). We excluded any cases in which there was no interpretation mentioned, or in which it was unclear if the interpretation could be attributed to the author.

Unfortunately, there were not many examples that satisfied this description; however, we can indeed see that from the mapping patterns in Table 5 that *they* (among other pronouns) is used with all trans and non-binary identities in our corpus (along of course with a healthy amount of *he*).

<table><caption>**Table 5** – Mapping patterns with trans/non-binary identities</caption><thead><tr><th>Identity Label</th><th>he</th><th>she</th><th>they</th><th>mixed</th></tr></thead></table>
<table><tr><td>Trans man</td><td>21</td><td>0</td><td>3</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>Trans woman</td><td>5</td><td>6</td><td>2</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>Non-binary</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>1 (they...she)</td></tr></table>

This usage of *they* is consistent with the innovative varieties described in the previous work described in the introduction, where *they* can be used with antecedents of any gender, and the fact that it is frequently employed by speakers who also readily apply preferred trans identity terms provides further support for the link between the emergence of definite specific singular *they* and increased consciousness of trans and non-binary identities. See examples in (21) below.

(21) (a) I agree with the first part, but if Gwyndolin identified as female then why does everyone misgender **them** by referring to them as "he"? [...] I figure that between the breasts, the statement that Gwyndolin was "Born a boy but raised a girl" and the pronouns, that **they**'re a trans guy. (2019)

(b) why does everyone misgender **them** by referring to them as "he"? Even in the Japanese dub Japan has a really, REALLY bad history of representing obviously trans characters as crossdressers. It's a very big problem in the trans community [...] A lot of very, very obviously trans characters are constantly misgendered in Anime, but I'm not a big fan of the genre so I can't really go into specifics, I just know it's a big problem cause a lot of trans subs I'm in constantly talk about how a character wants to be a girl, presents as a girl, but everyone still uses he/him pronouns. (2019)

(c) In the first Dark Souls game, we have the Goddess Dark Moon Gwyndolin. At one point, we figure out **she** is actually a he, raised as a goddess by Gwyn. However, it is my firm belief that **she** is a trans goddess and I will explain why. Sadly, Gwyndolin doesn't refer to **themselves** as a he or she, as god or goddess, which makes things more complicated. All the item descriptions describe **them** as a he. (2016)

We therefore argue that the parallel rises of *they* and trans/non-binary identity terms, as well as (to a lesser extent) the mapping patterns in Table 5, provide an argument that the rise of singular *they* with proper names is linked to the emergence of new gender identity categories, starting (according to our corpus data) around 2015. In fact, the time frame of our corpus (2011-2022) spans a period that has been particularly eventful with respect to gender and language. As summarized by Baron (2020), the past decade in the United States has seen the emergence and institutionalization of gender identities that do not strictly conform to the (cis)male/female binary, as well as institutional acknowledgement of language to refer to people with those identities. For example, in 2016, a joint policy by the US Department of Justice and the department of education ordered schools to acknowledge students' gender identity, and later that year, Chicago public schools adopted new guidelines to support trans and non-binary students,
including policies on using preferred pronouns[xi]. In 2015, major American universities, such as Tennessee and Harvard, adopted a policy asking all students to identify “their pronoun”, and the same year, “singular they” was voted Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. Thus, the years 2015-2016 were a time of great consciousness raising with respect to language and gender identity, and we hypothesize that the *Dark Souls* community, like many others, is also sensitive to these changes. Note that it is not surprising that these gamers are not early adopters either of *they* or of trans/non-binary readings of Gwyndolin: as discussed above, this community can be extremely hostile to anyone who does not present themselves as a cis hetero man. The *Dark Souls* community (at least the one on Reddit) therefore differs from other video game communities of practice, where there appears to be more support for trans identities. For example, Heritage (2022) presents a study of discussions about the character Pegalos in World of Warcraft (Activision/Blizzard), who is an out trans man. Heritage finds that the majority of contributors on Blizzard’s official WoW forum are supportive of Pegalos. Furthermore, even those who make anti-trans statements nevertheless refer to Pegalos using his preferred pronoun: *he*[xii]. As we will discuss further below, the cultures of Dark Souls and WoW are clearly very different, with the former tolerating far fewer deviations from the heterosexual male norm. This being said, the fact that, by 2018, these identities and linguistic practices are starting to appear even in the most macho parts of video game culture is a testament to the success that the popularization and institutionalization of these practices a few years earlier has had.

When we turn to the set of insults in the corpus, we find a more surprising pattern: as shown in Table 6, there is a marked increase in the use of the terms *trap* and *femboy* in the latter two thirds of the corpus.

<table><caption>**Table 6** – Counts and percentages of occurrences of insulting terms over time</caption><thead><tr><th>Term</th><th>2011-14</th><th>2015-18</th><th>2019-22</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Femboy</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>25 (0.513%)</td></tr><tr><td>Trap</td><td>3 (0.278%)</td><td>16 (0.669%)</td><td>18 (0.369%)</td></tr><tr><td>Ladyboy</td><td>0</td><td>3 (0.125%)</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>Shem*le</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>1 (0.021%)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Like other FromSoftware games, *Dark Souls* has a multi-player function in which players can leave asynchronous messages for each other in the game world. The messages must be composed from a fixed vocabulary provided by the game’s developers. *Trap* is part of this fixed vocabulary, the developers’ intentions presumably being that it could help players warn each other of in-game hazards; however, this word has been redeployed by some players as a transphobic insult referring to Gwyndolin in the game itself, as well as on Reddit. As shown in Table 6, despite the option to qualify Gwyndolin in this transphobic way being available since the launch
of the game, it is employed more than twice as frequently by players after 2015 than before. What could have caused a rise in both the outdated terms and the insults, and also possibly contributed the rise in the preferred terms around 2014-2015?

As discussed earlier, the mid to late 2010s were a period of increasing trans visibility in the wider public. As discussed extensively in the collection *Trap door*, edited by Gosset et al., increasing visibility can and has led to increased violence, harassment and political pushback against trans individuals. This may help to explain the increase of insulting and contentious terms. Further, consider that this period was a very eventful time with respect to gender in the video game world. More specifically, 2014 was the main year of the #GamerGate movement. Because of its virulence, the #GamerGate movement brought the question of gender to the forefront of many players' minds, by virtue of having “refocused popular discussions about gaming cultures into ones about gender, launched female game developers and critics into the public spotlight, and raised additional questions about social media as an avenue for gendered harassment and threats” (Braithwaite 2016:1). #GamerGate both sensitized and polarized gaming communities such as *Dark Souls*’ on issues related to gender and feminism, though, sadly, the most common result was that “the very idea of integrating elements of feminism into video games is read as actual evidence of a conspiracy” (Chess and Shaw 2015).

We can see the possible effects of #GamerGate in our data itself: in addition to the reference to ‘modern political fads’ in (11), the players posting on the *Dark Souls* subreddit frequently adopt positions towards discussions about Gwyndolin’s gender that are in line with the #GamerGate concern about bringing ‘politics’ into gaming (see also Heritage 2022).

(22) (a) Yah, you know actually really wish Gwyndolyn was explicitly trans. I feel like there have been more than a few attempts to clunkly insert gender and sexuality into video games pure purely for social Justice Internet points, and I think this is the absolute best example in a video game I’ve ever seen of someone being gender queer and actually having it make total sense and be interesting in context. (2022)

(b) No, if you had read into the lore of Gwyndolin, *he* identifies and is identified as a *male*. Due to his connection to the moon, Gwyn had raised him more like a daughter. This explains his feminine attire, the feminine appearance of the Brass Set, his feminine but masculine voice, and the Reversal Ring in Gwyn’s tomb in Dark Souls 3. Even Yorshka refers to Gwyndolin as a *brother*.

Please leave your trans agenda out of Dark Souls and read into its lore. You’ll learn quite a bit.”
(2019)

On the other hand, there are players in our corpus who actively call out those who they perceive as being part of the #GamerGate mob.

(23) (In response to “Trap is not a slur”)
Lol okay. I love cis people telling trans people what is and isn't a slur to the trans community. It's literally no different than the Epic Gamers telling gay people, "F×g doesn't mean gay anymore snowflake". You don't get to ignore the usage and connotation of the word just because you want to homie. Go to /r/asktransgender and ask them how they feel about being called a trap. It's a slur for trans women. (2019)

In summary, contrary to the earlier portion of our corpus, it is clear that at least some discussions of Gwyndolin's gender in the later portion (including the most recent ones in 2022) take place against the backdrop of conflicts associated with #GamerGate, and we hypothesize that this social conflict played a role in raising Dark Souls players' consciousness around gender identity. What we see in our corpus is that, before 2014, the fact that the character Gwyndolin does not conform to conventional man/woman (or even human) norms flies largely under the radar; however, starting in 2015, the question of Gwyndolin's gender and what pronoun should be used to refer to Gwyndolin becomes a salient topic of discussion for the *Dark Souls*massey. Figuring out which gender identity labels and pronouns Gwyndolin “uses” becomes a source of heated discussion, as such conflicts related to the institutionalization of trans/non-binary identities are reproduced on these online forums. However, thanks to the specific history of the video gaming medium, and of *Dark Souls* in particular, these conflicts become integrated into existing ones involving whether or not anyone who is not a cis, straight white man can be depicted in or play video games. In this way, we can see the rise in *they* in our data as going hand in hand with the emergence of new gender identities (particularly trans and non-binary ones) in the minds of *Dark Souls* players, and this rise follows a period of social change resulting in the idea that, at least for these players, gender identity itself is up for debate.

5. Conclusion

This paper presented a diachronic study of pronouns used to refer to Gwyndolin from *Dark Souls*
on Reddit, as well as the terms to refer to this boss' gender. We showed that, although players
overwhelmingly interpreted Gwyndolin as a cis man and used the pronoun *he*, both the set of
gender categories and the pronouns that they mobilize change over time. In particular, players
start to use *they* to refer to Gwyndolin after 2015, just around the time that they start to interpret
Gwyndolin's gender as either trans (man/woman) or non-binary. We suggested that these two
changes were likely linked to broader changes in anglophone society, such as institutional
recognition of trans/non-binary identities and singular *they* in the United States. In this way, our
paper provides new empirical evidence that the ongoing political and cultural changes supporting
gender diversity are having a real impact on language use, even in some of the most recalcitrant
communities (such as the *Dark Souls*massey). At the same time, our corpus also shows the
effects of other less progressive social movements which are specific to gamer communities on
the discourse on Gwyndolin's gender. In particular, post #GamerGate (2014-2015), we find an
overall increase in debates around Gwyndolin's gender and, consequently, an increase in the use
of homophobic, misogynistic and transphobic terms. Therefore, although we can conclude that
there has been some small progress in terms of the community becoming less hegemonic with
respect to their cis straight male orientation, there is still a long way to go.

Our paper also makes a contribution to syntactic analyses of variation and change in third person pronouns in English. Our study largely supports the analyses of Conrod (2019, 2022), and Konnelly & Cowper (2020), and Bjorkman (2017), which suggest that ongoing linguistic changes are contributing to increased acceptability of singular *they* with definite and named antecedents. These changes have resulted in a grammar for some speakers where pronouns are no longer required to have a gender marking. The combined judgements and experimental data from these authors (as well as others such as Ackerman 2018) suggest that these changes are most pervasive among speakers who either are transgender or non-binary, or who are acquainted with someone who is trans or non-binary. All of this helps support the idea that this change towards vastly increased acceptability of *they* with specific antecedents is driven by ongoing social changes. We provide valuable “real time” data that validates these authors’ hypotheses that were made only using apparent time data.

Of course, the scope of this paper has been very small (*Dark Souls*proc), so it would be of
great interest to see whether our results can be replicated in much larger online communities of
practice or even on naturalistic corpora based on spoken language. We hope that our modest
study, which illustrates the contribution that studying environmental storytelling media can make
to the study of gender and language, can serve as inspiration for more substantial investigations
of the relationship between gender ideologies and language use.

The power of the moon was strong in Gwyndolin, and thus he was raised as a daughter.
His magic garb is silk-thin, and hardly provides any physical defense.

<footnote>[i] See also Moulton et al. (2020) for a discussion of similar age-based variation with deictic uses of singular *they*.</footnote>

<footnote>[ii] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/environmental-storytelling</footnote>

<footnote>[iii] https://gamerant.com/dark- souls- storytelling-new unique good/</footnote>

<footnote>[iv] For example, the item description of Gwyndolin's armour, the Moonlight Set, includes the lines:</footnote>

<footnote>[v] Note we excluded two examples of *they* from before 2015, which are quite different from the ones that we find later in the dataset, such as (3-c). The two occurrences of pre-2015 they are shown below.</footnote>

<footnote>(i) (a) Tricky: A woman to some, no woman at all, plays mother to children, a dangerous game. Causes pain and death though no blood stains the hands. Powerful while fragile a</footnote>
fraught combination, hides behind curtains from shame and self loathing. Who are **they**?
(2012)

(b) Because **they** are the moonlight butterfly! (2012)

(a) is from a series of riddles about the Dark Souls bosses that a poster has made up and shared. In fact, the poster indicates that there are two possible answers: Gwyndolin and the Bed of Chaos (another boss). Thus, *they* in (a) could be encoding either the plurality of the bosses described in the riddle, or their 'unknown gender' aspect, both of which are more acceptable to older speakers than *they* after a definite proper name (Conrod 2019).

(b) also involves a kind of plurality of referents: in this example, the poster is stating that two bosses, Gwyndolin and the non-human Moonlight Butterfly, are one in the same (presumably because they have the same theme music). This is again a very different semantic and pragmatic context to the examples that we find later in the corpus, where Gwyndolin (and only Gwyndolin) is referred to with *they*.

[vi] We ran a binomial logistic regression using the function glm(), with pre or post 2015 as an independent variable and whether each post contained an occurrence of *they*, alone or in mixed forms, as the dependent variable.

[vii] Where Gwyndolin is Gwyn's son.

[viii] Such as
https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls/comments/x3b1z/whats_the_average_age_of_a dark_souls_ player/ or
https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls/comments/rtja2/how_old_is_the_average dark_souls_ player/

[ix] https://quantificfoundry.com/2017/01/19/female-gamers-by-genre/

[x] This last term has been copied verbatim from its poster and emphasizes the fact that the poster clearly intended it as an insult - they think it's a slur and have written it accordingly to escape moderation.

[xi] Note that the federal policy was later overturned by the Trump administration.

[xii] Since he is often used as a kind of androcentric default in the video game world, we might wonder if the anti-trans players would have been so respectful if Pegalos was a trans woman who used she.

[xiii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)
## References

Ackerman, Lauren (2018) Processing singular they with generic and specific antecedents. Poster presented at *AMLaP (Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing)*. Berlin, Germany, 7.

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