Thread:Mfaccas/@comment-24577221-20150405154027/@comment-24577221-20150410024144

I would say that the situation is somewhat ambiguous.

In English, we don't usually use "it" to refer to people. As I learned English in school, a person of unknown sex would be referred to by "he or she" if we wanted to be wordy, or by "he" if we wanted to be concise; the male pronoun was the default and was assumed to include the unknown-possibly-female case. The standards of the language have shifted as people have come to accept that that was an inappropriate bias, and now we use "they" and "their" for the singular-person-of-unknown-sex as well as for the plural cases. (And I gather that that's a return to earlier common practise, not a new thing.)

So given current practise, it's odd that the monsters are consistently referred to by "it" rather than by "they". To me, it seems most likely that the monsters are neither male nor female, that they only breed with a breeding chamber. Remember that you can't put two of the same kind of monster in a breeder, which somewhat argues against the idea that the monsters are species with both males and females.

I looked at the French text file for the game. Monsters in French are referred to with the male pronoun "le", even the PomPom... which is a bit of a weird thing since in French, objects and people are more-or-less always gendered. I'd have expected that BBB would have declared that the PomPom was female, but apparently not. Unless the PomPom was considered to be a thing, not a person, in which case choices of gender can be somewhat arbitrary.

My German is rusty (and was never strong), but I'm able to see that in the German text file, the PomPom is referred to with the male pronoun "einen". But German can be extremely weird with genders of things. A young girl in German is "Mädchen"... neither male nor female. At any rate, I can't read that file well enough to get any clues there.

English doesn't have "standards" for referring to persons whose sex is known but doesn't fit into simple male/female categories, as opposed to persons of unknown sex. That's a subject of considerable debate among grammarians and people who are connected with such persons.

Bottom line: it's a big can of worms. German: "Wurm" is masculine, "Schnecke" is feminine but is used more for things like snails and slugs, and never mind that earthworms are hermaphrodites.