Talk:Ilima

Gender confirmation for Ilima

I'm dusting off my account to put in an explanation for Ilima's gender for any browsers or contributors looking to this page for information.

In most languages, the recent trailer and website updates released for Pokemon Sun and Moon avoid using gendered terms for Ilima. The one exception is the Russian version of the website, which states, "Капитан Илима (Ilima) – знаток Покемонов обычного типа. Он окончил Школу для Тренеров, став героем для студентов той школы." I highlighted the gendered words in the text: "он" is the masculine pronoun, and the verbs "окончить" and "стать" are conjugated in the masculine (as Russian verbs need to match the gender of the subject). This -- along with the fact that Ilima's French name (Althéo) and Spanish/Italian name (Liam) are masculine -- is the reason why the prevailing interpretation among Pokemon fans seems to be that Ilima is a guy.

On the other hand, while Russian does have a neuter pronoun ("оно"), it's never used for human beings, so the default for describing a gender-neutral person in Russian would be the masculine pronoun "он." (It would be difficult and awkward to try and reconstruct Ilima's Russian website description without any gender references, since -- as I mentioned earlier -- Russian verbs must conjugate based on the gender of the subject.) Ilima's German name (Elima) is more likely to come across as feminine to German speakers, too. Finally, Ilima's dialogue from the Japanese trailer is polite and gender-neutral.

All things considered, it may be a good idea to reword this page with gender-neutral language until further confirmation (so nobody gets embarrassed when the games release next month). --Arpha (talk) 18:25, 14 October 2016 (UTC)