I liked the lack of gendering. It is, I think, actually quite hard to do -- I know most of the time I wind up subconsciously gendering a character one way or the other even if I don't know for sure, and in the rare instances where I've gotten it backwards, it's pretty jarring. But in this case it didn't go either way and I liked having a narrative where the treatment of the character was truly egalitarian. It was refreshing.