It looks like some people really can’t handle the fact that Temtem is using inclusive pronouns to cater to transgender people.
Temtem released on Steam early access on Monday as the Pokémon MMO that Nintendo refused to make. If you’ve ever played a Pokémon game, then you already know 90% of what’s going on in Temtem. There are TemCards instead of Poké Balls, a TemPedia instead of a PokéDex, and instead of a sleepy old professor who sends out into the world with absolutely no professional training to do dangerous research, you have a sleepy old professor who sends you out into the world without any professional training to perform dangerous research.
See the differences?
Okay, so most of Temtem is the same as Pokémon, but there are SOME differences between the two games. One of those differences hits you as soon as you start your Temtem journey.
Since Temtem is an MMORPG, you get to create your own character instead of having to use a preset template like you do in Pokémon. Any gamer that’s played an MMO since the late 2000s will recognize the character creation step as an integral part of any online RPG, and while Temtem’s character creator is fairly basic, it still does a great job of letting you customize the look of your trainer.
It also doesn’t limit you in any way. If you want to be a male with traditionally female hairstyles, you can do that. Want to be a particularly butch female? No problemo--just pick the female body type, some hardcore animé-style male villain eyes, and some jeans. Mix and match to be anything in between.
Temtem also doesn’t limit you in terms of pronouns. You get to select He, She, or They so the game (and everyone else) knows precisely how you’d prefer to be addressed.
While this makes Temtem remarkably more progressive than Pokémon, it has sadly angered a small segment of the gamer community.
Temtem has very positive reviews on Steam (89% as of the time of this writing), but a significant portion of the negative reviews take aim at Temtem’s pronouns.
"if i could get a tem for every gender i would get TEMTEM. why does it make me chose my pronoun after i chose my gender," wrote one particularly ignorant reviewer. "there are only 2 genders."
If the poor grammar wasn’t a giveaway, this person isn’t exactly a great resource for gender studies. Geneticists have identified at least 6 different ways the X and Y chromosomes can combine to form a human being, and they're discovering more all the time. In fact, depending on the source, there could be as many as 81 different possible genders. Facebook acknowledges 58 different gender options for its users, depending on how they prefer to identify.
Using the catchall term of “they” to identify all these different possible options seems woefully inadequate, but it at least acknowledges there’s more than just men and women out there.
Why certain gamers get upset about the “singular they” is something I will never understand. Thankfully, they appear to be in the minority, and it doesn’t look like Temtem is about to change its character creator just for them.