I lean more towards male, and that may be because I've seen Skaros play Cloudy more often.

Cloudy's preferred pronouns are cattee, catself, and WHY IS MY BOWL EMPTY?

These pronouns will do! :D

I tend to think of Cloudy as female, but yeah, that's influenced by who I know created the character.

But yeah, this can actually contribute to a discussion the poor shortcuts that many other designers and viewers use to distinguish male & female characters: that male characters often look like a standard, default design, but that female characters are often given exaggerated physical traits or markers that we've socially marked as feminine: feminine hairstyle (even when the animal doesn't have extra hair), diminutive facial/bodily features, makeup/jewelry, etc. [I like to point to Gravity Badgers as a recent example (warning: autoplaying YouTube video): compare the design of Sery to the other characters there, especially the first three. (The latter character can contibute to discussions of how we view fatness.)]

This, despite the fact that you can't really tell the gender of many animals with a simple glance. And then from there, given that characters aren't created in a vacuum lacking social commentary, you can get into larger discussions of gender identity, as well.

Augh, I could dive further into these discussions, as I've been diving into issues of gender representation for at least the past couple years, but I'll stop myself here!

________


Even so! If you've been having fun with the ambiguity, more power to you!

Great example there with Gravity Badgers -- very clearly illustrates the gamut of super-team design tropes, where, judging by design alone, "female" is the most defining personality trait of the token woman, and she winds up looking much more humanoid in order for viewers to identify her as female.
(by the way BADGERS IN SPACE?!?! Haven't seen this before. This looks nifty!)

Since male is the assumed "default," it seems that female needs to be explicitly signaled in a design, while you can get away with some great variety in male designs. Inside Out's characters are an example I keep seeing -- you have a 3:2 female majority, which is notable for a big animated movie, but dang, look at how different the two male characters are from each other and from the other characters!

Nah, this is good stuff! Love to think/read about gender representation!

I think a major problem boils down to male creators not knowing enough women themselves, to the point where they'd have insight into how those women think and feel.

Example: Female protagonists in novels who take time out to think about the weight and shape of their boobs, because the male author thinks about boobs a fair amount, and/or thinks about his own penis, and so assumes that women must think the same way.

I've seen lots of fursuits that have managed to subtly signal that the character is female, without resorting to massive curves or even, big eyelashes.

Definitely, that is a major problem. When watching movies, my dad makes a game of picking out ridiculous dialogue and saying, "Sooo, this was written by a man..."

Wonderful discussion and so, so true all the time.

When I created Tica the character, I made the actual shape of the character simply "sloth," but I did add the flower over the ear as a gender signifier. Part of that has to do with Tica's personality--she enjoys flowers, and skirts and flowy clothes and the color pink--but another part of that calculus in my mind was, how often did I want to get misgendered in suit? If I put a clear signifier, it would happen way less often than if I didn't. Even with my DD cup boobs in a partial suit, without the flower or a pink dress, I get misgendered quite a bit in suit.

That being said, I hate the character design laziness of "pink = female; everything else = male" and I strive for a diversity of body types, animal species, and styles when I design anthro characters, most of whom are female because that's just how I roll.

To be honest I've never actually associated cloudy with any particular gender ^.^;

Neat! :D

Cloudy is cloudy. Cloudy will always be Cloudy.

Cloudy is immutable!

I think I always thought Cloudy was female, and I couldn't tell you exactly why. Once I met you, that educated guess was solidified in my mind, and now even if your dude friends wear Cloudy I still think the character is female :)

I kind of have a "presume female unless proven male" kind of mindset when it comes to animals, which is the opposite of what everyone else does--like when I'm at the zoo, unless a species is obviously sexually dimorphic (like lions with manes and lionesses without) or you can clearly see the genitalia (like with giraffes or zebras), if I want to talk about a specific animal I use the pronouns "she" unless I find out that that specific animal is male. Everyone else I know does the opposite, assuming that any given animal before them is male unless they're corrected on it. Like, we have two dogs, a girl and a boy, and no one ever calls the male "she," but they call the female "he" all the time.

idk. random things I was thinking about.

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing your perspective. :)

Yeah, I definitely tend to presume male with animals until corrected. I wonder to what extent presumed gender influences the way we interact with animals. Like, there was that one famous psych study where an adult was more likely to give a doll to a presumed baby girl than to a boy, and there were differences in the amount of touch they received. (I think? I'm fuzzy on the details.) Are there parallels with how we play with dogs and such?