Now that this has been completely overshadowed by more recent threads...

Looks to me like everyone who responded either a) abstained or b) is okay with the idea that Flowers' genders are fairly arbitrary, except maybe in a few notable circumstances where it would be weird to suddenly switch the pronouns. (That said, I'd love to see an agent try it sometime and see what happens. *g*)

Anyway, this is good news for me, since I don't have to go back and edit everything I've done with the Kudzu. Yay! But what I will do is make a note of the gender used in TOS on the wiki article and write it off as perception, or something that pretty much allows people to draw their own conclusions.

The Board wills it!

~Neshomeh, who thanks everyone who gave their opinion on the matter.

I have to agree with Techno-Dann's scientific assessment. The kudzu is a plant, so at any given time, different parts of its body are male or female, so either pronoun assigned to it is equally correct. (Or equally incorrect?)

As for Wikis, the three I'm active on (ours, Bulbapedia and TV Tropes) seem to log me out every couple of months or so, but logging back in only takes a handful of seconds, and then I'm set for another sixth of a year. So it really shouldn't be a problem for anyone to remain logged in. (Make sure you're checking "remember me on this computer" if you're not on a public terminal.)

I like the idea that gender in Flowers is just assumed. Maybe it is for the psychological response the particular gender garners from the agents (which would also explain the idea that different agents have different impressions of some Flowers gender). No matter how much we may bemoan it, in our modern society, males are still typically seen as more authoritative than females, so the Sunflower Official and Marquis de Sod take on strongly male personas, because that is the effect they are trying to project. The kudzu may have decided to take on a female persona to come across as more warm and caring to aide its work in FicPsych.

Thinking out loud here: Maybe it would seem male to a canon character or agent recruit traumatized by a Sue, because for that character the female persona wouldn't be trusted as much. Whereas a Grrl power character might perceive even the Sunflower Official as female. I agree with the others. I could see these kinds of perception differences making for interesting conversations.

Overall, I support leaving the wiki page with all female gender references, because that is how she is referred to most of the time. However that gender assignment came about.

Like most Flowers, physically, the Kudzu is both male and female.

Actually, there's a human parallel: The difference between physical and mental gender. While most people have a set physical and a set mental gender that match each other, there are quite a few whose mental and physical genders don't match, or whose mental and/or physical gender is ambiguous. For example, you might be physically female, mentally androgynous; or physically androgynous, mentally male; or any combination; or even change somewhat as your personality changes.

Those configurations are the minority for humans; but what about Flowers? Most plants (including kudzu) are both genders at once. Maybe the Flowers' gender is simply more fluid than human gender. Maybe, instead of a small minority having no particular gender, both at once, or changing gender, that's actually the norm for Flowers. Maybe gender doesn't really matter to them very much--would mental gender matter very much to you, if you came from a species where anyone could reproduce with anyone else?

It's entirely possible that the only reasons the Flowers have genders at all is that they deal with two-gendered species so often--species who insist on assigning them gendered pronouns. (It doesn't help that English doesn't have a very good pronoun for an ambiguously gendered person. "It" sounds like an object; "they" is bad grammar. And English is probably the predominant language at HQ because it is the predominant language on World One.) It could be that for the Flowers, a gender is about as important to them as our hair colors or our names are to us--something that you associate with yourself, and other people see you as; but something that really isn't all that fundamental to who you are.

BTW, I didn't edit the Kudzu's page, but I may be part of the problem, since I was the one who added the link to "The Dark Elf" on Jay's and Acacia's wiki pages...

As July and Dann have said, there are ways to explain it, And personally, I've always thought of the Flowers' genders are more or less arbitrary choices on their parts (therefore there being no 'wrong' pronoun), and also, it's always possible that an agent simply gets it wrong. Sacriligious though this may sound, Jay could've just made a 'mistake' (speaking within the fourth wall, of course).

I think it makes a lot of sense to keep it a mystery-- Agents refer to it as a he or she based on, as has been said, personal projection. It's more fun that way! It could be a soure of inter-departmental gossip, and curiosity, with the Flower itself carefully never giving unwarranted clues-- or contradictory clues. I like the idea of the Flowers being mostly amused by our need to assign gender to them.

On the Wiki: agreed.

Would just like to say that at times it is hard to log in. For instance, I've made several visits to the wiki in the past week or so where the log in button simply disappears after the page has loaded.

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I've noticed people get quite upset when someone has made changes to a page they consider their own. Isn't the point of the wiki that others can change those pages too?

If you don't want anonymous users to change the wiki then have the whole thing looked for registered users only, like the front page is.

Kudzu is a member of the Fabaceae family, which tend to be hermaphroditic - thus, the Kudzu could be either or both. It could change personas to deal with different agents, it could simply not care about pronouns, or it could have gotten bored with being make at some point in the past.

On the side of the Agents and Boarders.

While person Y might think "Oh, this Flower is definitely a male" person Z might privately think that that Flower seems to be more a female to them. Since as far as I can tell, we pretty much assign the gender pronouns we use for each Flower somewhat randomly, going by whatever whoever wrote it first concluded when they first started that character.

It could always depend on the personalities of the Flowers themselves, as well, if they notice or mind our silly use of gender pronouns for all of them. I'd suspect, for one, that while the poor Daisy would really care either way, the Marquis or the S.O. might flutter their petals in annoyance at being called female or a 'she', and I suspect the Queen Anne's Lace wouldn't exactly be amused either at being called a 'he' as well.

In short, I don't see anything wrong with you referring to the Kudzu in your work as a 'she', while the use of 'he' is notable in TOS.

We're anthropomorphizing flowers after all, and the key thing to that is perception and opinion- which could always lead to a hilarious moment in a spin off, if two groups who have different opinions on what gender certain flowers are met and argued about it-, and it's not there aren't other spinoffs that ignore things set as 'canon' by Jay and Acacia.



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On the subject of the Wiki, I agree that people seriously, seriously, need to log in or at least state who they are when editing to prevent people from thinking it's trolling or otherwise. It's not very hard to put a wrong fact in somewhere and have people be fooled by it. That should also go for people who use different usernames on the wiki as compared to the board, so they can be recognized as not a random person editing the whole thing into their private view.

After a while I sorta started taking for granted that I was, but it still logs me out at random. Anyway, I'll not vote because I've caused enough trouble with this already; was just stating why I wasn't logged in.