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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/44392
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/44392
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

> This is more for my own curiosity than anything else but I was wondering if when reading about a character with no specified gender and no description of their looks, does the choice of words used to describe their personality affect what your mental image of who you think they are?

If personality traits that are particularly strongly associated with a specific gender in the reader's culture are stressed this can lead to a reader making assumptions, as can the genre of the story but in the absence of these factors most people are going to assume a POV character of non-specified gender (as in it hasn't been specified, not that they are explicitly non-binary!) is going to be the same gender as them. Especially where the POV is 1st person.

Beyond gender readers will start to form an image based on things we know about them - e.g. their profession - if someone described a character as being a "blacksmith" for example readers will likely start to attribute certain characteristics to the way the character looks, e.g. large, muscular etc.

Or if a character starts to fit into a common trope in other media/stories they will start to imagine them as looking similar to other examples they have "seen". But the details will vary wildly depending on that reader's own experiences.

If a character is a hard-ass drill instructor for example I'm going straight to [R. Lee Ermey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Lee_Ermey) in my head - because I grew up with things like _Full Metal Jacket_ and _Space: Above and Beyond_ so in the absence of any other descriptive cues my brain pulls up "archetypal drill instructor" and that's mine - for someone who had _different_ influences in their life it may be completely different.

Original score: 5