Okay. I have tried to work out some way to talk about this that doesn't make me come off like a complete jerk, but which also perhaps opens up a useful avenue of interpretation, so I'm gonna give it a go.

People feel frustrated about a story saying that Byleth Fireemblem is non-binary when there is a lot of *mechanical* evidence in the game's systems that puts proof to the opposite.

HOWEVER.

I think the actual ISSUE comes not from the interpretation of the character, which is a more or less unassailable report of the author's sense-making process

And more from the framing of the story, a lot of it metatextual, that positions it as a capital-t Truth.

"Queer player-author writes self-report of their sense-making experience of game element [x]" is an increasingly common genre of writing. And there is nothing WRONG with that genre of writing. We learn a lot from the sense-making practices of others.

But it also often ends up being about identity categories that are, for better or worse, discursively unstable in the public imaginary right now.

What non-binary even MEANS is a thing that queer people are still working out for themselves.

And this is exacerbated by the fact that there is a persistent cultural belief that one individual's sense-making of text [x] has no worth unless it's The Truth, so when those stories appear, they're often FRAMED as The Truth, to their detriment.

The real challenge for us, both as an industry (games journalism) and a culture (game players), is to find a way to position these potentially useful -- if sometimes idiosyncratic -- interpretations in a way that doesn't provoke people to immediately shout "oh COME ON"