Who Is The Canon MC In Wuthering Waves?

Summary Rover is Wuthering Waves' canonical protagonist, available in both male and female versions.

Both genders for Rover are equally canon, avoiding developer favoritism seen in other gacha games.

The minor difference between the male and female Rovers in Wuthering Waves makes no impact on the narrative.

The newest open world gacha game on the market, Wuthering Waves, bears many similarities to its predecessors in the genre, including a mostly-silent protagonist with a selectable gender – and following the trend of other gacha games, one protagonist may turn out to be more canon than the other. Developed by Kuro Games, previously best known for the action gacha game Punishing Grey Raven, Wuthering Waves is the studio's first foray into open world gameplay, and, like Tower of Fantasy before it, takes plenty of cues from Genshin Impact.

Protagonists in gacha games are typically intended for players to be able to self-insert to varying degrees, sometimes to the extent that they're never shown on screen or have extremely ambiguous designs, as is the case in games like Honkai Impact 3rd and Arknights. Somewhat more common in gacha games, however, are protagonists who have mostly pre-set designs and (sometimes) personalities, with players only being able to customize their name and gender. This can lead to cases where one gender for the protagonist is considered more canon than the other, serving as the default for both story and marketing purposes.

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Rover Is Wuthering Waves' Canon MC

Players Can Choose Between Two Versions Of Wuthering Waves' Protagonist

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The main protagonist of Wuthering Waves is a mysterious, dark-haired character called "Rover." Although players can enter a name of their choice, most other characters in the story will refer to the protagonist by their default name. Complicating the issue of the canon protagonist, however, is that Rover can be either male or female, depending on which version the player chooses at the start of the game. Each version has a unique design and voice, but minimal gameplay or story differences, rendering the choice mostly cosmetic.

Fortunately, both protagonist genders in Wuthering Waves seem to be equally canon, with neither Rover taking a significant precedence over the other in marketing or the in-game story. In the game's pre-launch marketing and key art, both genders for Rover appear and share screentime, sometimes even in the same scene, and (as of the game's initial patch) the in-game story doesn't try to account for the presence of the un-selected gender, instead making the player's chosen Rover the only version that exists in the narrative.

Some key art for Wuthering Waves only features male Rover, but as of the game's launch, most of the art and marketing has a relatively even split between the two.

Notably, this approach to the game's main protagonist avoids a pitfall that Genshin Impact has fallen into, and which more recently released gacha games seem to be trying to avoid as well, that being a perception of developer favoritism towards one protagonist. Genshin, in making both genders in-universe siblings instead of different versions of the same character, tends to present the male option as the canon or default option of the two, which can result in the female MC feeling like an afterthought.

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Either Gender For Rover Can Be Canon

Wuthering Waves Gives Both Versions Of Rover Relatively Equal Focus

In many other gacha games that give players a choice regarding the protagonist's gender, the male option is assumed to be default, and will feature more heavily in out-of-game marketing and official art. Sometimes, like in Genshin, this can be for story reasons - with both versions of the main character present in the story, sometimes on opposing sides of the main conflict, it's easier to operate on the assumption that one or the other have canon roles, regardless of what can actually be true in-game for different players.

While there are some minor differences that depend on Rover's selected gender in certain scenes or interactions with other characters, the story of Wuthering Waves plays out largely the same regardless of the player character's gender, and the two Rovers are more like different versions of the same person, rather than anything else. Both versions of the character are fully represented in both the marketing and the story, with relatively few things pointing towards one or the other as the intended or canon option.

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At least as of the launch patch of Wuthering Waves, both versions of Rover are equally canon, and neither the game's story nor marketing posit either gender as the "true" protagonist of the game. The non-selected version isn't present in the story, making it relatively uncomplicated to designate both versions of Rover as equally important. Future marketing material or story content may heavily feature one or the other, but as long as Wuthering Waves retains a relatively equal split between the two Rovers, either one can be the canon version.