Why Do You Use 'He/Him' For Aoi?

One of the questions I get with the greatest regularity is "why do you use he/him for Aoi when the official site uses they/them?", and with the godawful nature of Twitter for communicating anything with nuance, I decided to answer that question here. So if you've been linked here after asking me: it's okay that you asked! I just don't want to try and re-explain myself over and over with a restrictive character limit.

Pronouns do not work that way in Japanese

I often see people say that the characters use they/them, and... that's not correct, on two counts.

First: they're characters, not real people. We use pronouns to refer to them, but they do not have agency and cannot "use" any pronouns. There is no objective truth to reach for. You can only point to how real people talk about the fictional characters.

Second: The entire text of the canon is in Japanese, and translation is overlaid on top of that. Even if they were real people... I don't "use" lui/suo pronouns, because I don't speak Italian; what pronouns I "use" in a language I do not speak is kind of the wrong question to be asking. You can ask me what pronouns you should refer to me by in Italian, or you can infer based on the gendered pronouns I use in English, but this is possible because I'm a real person who is speaking a language with gendered pronouns.
The characters of Paradox Live both are not real and are written in Japanese. Gendered third-person pronouns straight up do not exist (in nearly the same capacity) in Japanese that they do in English; the grammar of the language simply does not function that way.

Any pronoun, whether it's making a judgment call to use 'they' for Anne or the completely uncontroversial use of 'he' for Allen, is just a grammatical assumption that I have to overlay on the text to make it more comprehensible in English based on context, content, and personal interpretation. Using third person pronouns is always the translator adding something that does not exist in Japanese but that is required in English.

So why 'he'?

Because I think Aoi is a trans man, and specifically a person whose being trans is not public knowledge.

That's the tl;dr. I just think he's a trans man. I think the story and everything we know about Aoi points (to my eye) to him being a binary trans man who is not out, and the official use of "they" is being used to ambiguate his gender (in the way that you use 'they' for someone whose gender you don't know or want to confirm and for people who you know use they/them).

For more details on why I think this:

He's a "little prince with a secret".: Everything we know about Aoi points to him being a private person who is hiding "something" from the people around him (and, arguably, even from the other members of VISTY). This secret is pretty universally (among anyone in the fandom who's paying attention) understood to be that he's not a cis man. If Aoi is publically referred to as they/them, then his being trans is not a secret. If he's meant to be nonbinary, then people aren't supposed to know, and so people aren't going to call him neutral pronouns.
He's part of an all-male idol group.: Pretty self-explanatory. There are mixed gender music groups, yes, but they're the exception rather than the rule and it's fair to assume that VISTY are probably meant to be read as all-male. This tracks with his remarks that VISTY is the only place he can be who he really is. If he's joining a male group and playing a very masculine role in the prince character, to the point that he feels that the person he is on stage is who he really is and that he desperately doesn't want to lose, he probably wants to be seen (or at the very least, is comfortable being seen) as a man. AND SPEAKING OF THE PRINCE THING:
Princes are Anne's symbol of masculinity.: Princes have already set up as being the paragon of masculinity that Anne wants to escape from; Aoi wants to achieve it. To argue that "you don't have to be male to be a prince", while true in reality, kind of undermines the fact that princeliness is synecdoce for performed masculinity, as established through Anne. This puts Aoi in a great counterpoint/counterbalance with Anne, and that doesn't mean as much if you divorce "prince" from "ideal of manhood".
In other words: Anne doesn't want to be a prince because they specifically don't want to be a boy; ergo, Aoi wants to be a prince because he does.
There is official material on the matter.: The site uses they/them pronouns, but other official English-language materials (ex: the English language facebook page) consider he/him appropriate for Aoi, but always use they/them for Anne.
I just think it'd be neat.: I just like to interpret him this way.

But the official site...

I'm going to be honest: I don't really care what the official English site says. I only use the official facebook cap above to help strengthen my point, for those who care about the official word.

But if you want me to engage with it on its own terms, I'll do that. Compare the way that Anne and Aoi's profiles are written, using the official translations:

With the handsome face and courteous fan service, Aoi has established the position as the "prince" of VISTY. Aoi is usually cool and level-headed. Although Aoi has major troubles, their awkward side prevents them from revealing their troubles to those around them. Aoi secretly admires Anne of BAE, who lives a life unconstrained by convention.

Anne might appear to be a fashionable modern girl, but inside they're actually the most straightforward one in BAE. As a child, they were oppressed by their strict, old-fashioned mother. At the moment, Anne is determined to be honest about their own sensitivity. Anne now works part-time as a club hostess, making good use of their beauty.

Aoi's profile is written in a way that (to my ear) uses his name awkwardly often and only uses pronouns when completely necessary (note how they never use a pronoun in a sentence without using his name first), as opposed to the much more naturally flowing use of Anne's name and pronoun reference. It is very easy to write this sounding natural in Japanese; it is less so in English. (The fact that it's far easier to hide someone's gender in Japanese without drawing attention to the fact that their gender is unknown is a problem that Japanese media translations have struggled with forever.)

But more to the point:
The reason I use "they" and "them" for Anne isn't because they're the pronouns the site uses; I use they/them for Anne because, after listening to and reading the relevant canon material in Japanese, I have made a judgment call that they are written as transfeminine and additional context makes them track to me as nonbinary.
_{(*And if you want to argue that they're not written as transfemme and just as a GNC man: read MEMORY and also eat me.)}
So it follows with Aoi. I don't care what the site says; I'm going to translate based on what I think the text is doing. If the official site were to use he/him for Anne in English, I would still use 'they' for Anne because that's where my interpretation of the canon text has led me. By the same token, if the official site used she/her for Aoi, I would still use 'he'.

If you really can't reconcile this, if you would prefer to think of it as "he/they but Jakkal just uses 'he' when he writes about Aoi": go ahead. If later information comes out to change my mind about this, then I'll go back and edit all of my translations. But at present: I think he's a trans man, and that's why I use he/him for Aoi.