Desktop background by this tumblrist.

Many updates tend to spark crazy outbursts of fanart, particularly those that introduce new characters. It doesn’t even matter if the character is someone in a fictional book within the story. Actually, that probably only encourages it, since the vague allusions to a much bigger story tend to capture people’s imaginations and get people drawin’. And so there was this whole rash of cool Calmasis interpretations after that update. Not sure how to point you to the preponderance of this work, other than vaguely suggest you look up the #calmasis tag??

Pronouns

Probably most people regard s/he as a highly utilitarian concatenation for use when gender is unknown, if somewhat awkward. It does carry the advantage that everyone understands what you’re getting at. In this case we have no idea at all what Calmasis’ situation is. The narrative obviously leaves details of the book wide open. “Androgynous” is a broad term. Calmasis could identify as a specific gender, without having it revealed by him/her, or by the story for whatever reason. Or the character could be of an actual non-binary gender. We have no idea. We haven’t peeked inside the book to get a sense of this. Maybe at some point we will.

For those of non-binary gender, “s/he” can come off as dismissive, since it implies one or the other. Probably not all that many people are even aware of the array of neutral pronouns that are available, like ze or ne or THON. I’d bet the number of people unfamiliar with them is quite staggering, which makes it all the more difficult to assimilate any into language, or just drop them into a sentence casually. Pronouns are really fundamental units of communication too, so if you swap one for a strange word people don’t know, it really throws them for a loop. But hey, I’m down with the idea. English has been lumbering along without neutral pronouns for too many centuries already. They have loads more applications than just referencing people of certain gender identities.