User blog:BunsenH/Monsters: boy or girl? Male or female?

Is an Entbrat male or female? What about a PomPom?

The answer appears to be "no".

Let me unpack that a bit.

For starters, all of the official monster descriptions use "it" instead of "he" or "she", "its" instead of "her" or "his". That's what the game's creators and promoters say, in the game and on the Facebook page. I hope you'll agree that they know better than anyone else.

Some of the monsters are big and strong-looking, with low voices; some have hair on their faces. Some of the monsters are small and have high-pitched voices. But even for our real-world animals, some are big and strong-looking, with low-pitched voices, for both their makes and females. The same goes for the small ones with high-pitched voices. You can't guess if a given animal is female or male just from that. (And there are a number of types of animal that have their females larger and stronger than their males, so that comparison isn't a guarantee either.)

Some of the monsters do what we tend to think of as "girl" things, such as cheer-leading; some do what we tend to think of as "boy" things, like wearing a cowboy hat. That's not much of an indicator. Even among humans, girls and boys, men and women do all of these things. It's even less reliable when you're trying to guess from what monsters like to do.

Any pair of monsters on an island can be combined in a breeding experiment. All of them come from eggs, and those eggs seem to be involved in the breeding &mdash; we don't really know how that works, and that may be for the best. At any rate, the success or failure of monster breeding doesn't depend on whether they're big or small, or high-pitched or low-pitched; it doesn't depend on what they do.

The monsters are... whatever they are. If you want to assume that some kind of monster is male or female &mdash; what, all of them? All PopPoms, all Entbrats? That makes even less sense than to assume that they aren't either! &mdash; that's up to you. But officially, they're neither male nor female.