As you know, Corvidprompts uses neopronouns in our writing prompts. This is for a few reasons;
- neopronouns remove a gender bias from the prompts
This is important to me because of all the gendered troping that goes into developing a scene. I might be thinking of a femme fatale when I’m putting the prompt together, but the promptee (prompt user) might find it fits a male character much better
- They’re gender neutral, but use the same sentence structure she/her and he/him pronouns, which makes it easier to change the prompt to suit the promptee’s needs
my prompts are there to use! This includes editing them to ensure they work withint your narrative. I’ve even know some people that select worldbuilding ideas from a few prompts, without actually using any of the prompts. This is all fine and dandy.
- They change the tone or mood of the prompt
Corvidprompts specializes in dark, mysterious prompts with a magickal element. There’s just something so fantastical and mysterious about neopronouns that’s hard to mimic with conventional pronouns within two or three lines.
And on a personal note:
I like neopronouns, and when I first started creating prompts on my og blog hosted on tumblr, I wanted practice using them and putting them in prompts was a good way to do so.
On that note
Neopronouns! Some examples, and how to pronounce them
the base pronouns I use in my prompts are Xe/xir (for the first character to need them) Ze/zir (second character) and Ey/eir (third character)
I generally like to use a pronoun set that’s similar to she/her/hers/herself over he/him/his/himself because I find it’s easier to get confused over which word you use where
so it’s always xe/xir/xirs/xirself and not ze/zim/zis/zimself
Xe/xir and Ze/zir are phoentically identical- they sound the same! Like Zee/zer
Ey/eir are based on they/them pronouns and are pronounced like Ay/air
She went to the supermarket to get her favourite ice cream
Xe went to the supermarket to get xir favourite ice cream
Ze went to the supermarket to get zir favourite ice cream
Ey went to the supermarket to get eir favourite ice cream
Other pronoun sets that are pretty easy to use are Na/nir/nirs and Ce/cir/cirs- just change like, the first letter or two and you’ve got a new pronoun.
I have a longer, slightly outdated tutorial on making and using neopronouns here, including how to create fun sounding pronouns for fantasy characters! This tutorial expands on the pronouns listed above and goes a little further in depth on how to create neopronouns